Memoir by U of T emergency room doctor wins prize for nonfiction

The emergency room is on the ground floor of hospitals because every minute counts for a patient rushed to the ER.

In his memoir, Life on the Ground Floor, Dr. James Maskalyk, an assistant professor in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine, reflects on the way care is delivered in ERs from Toronto to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia.

Maskalyk's memoir won the $60,000 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction on Tuesday night, one of the largest prizes in Canada for nonfiction.

Maskalyk, who did his postgraduate medical training at U of T, splits his time between St. Michael’s Hospital and the Black Lion Hospital in the Ethiopian capital. When he began travelling to Ethiopia, the country had no ER doctors. It now has 15. 

Although the Black Lion Hospital is no more than “two tin rooms and a back hall,” the goal of emergency medicine there is the same as it is everywhere, he writes: “striving to give a stranger’s body another minute, another day, another year.”

Read about U of T's collaboration with Addis Ababa University

Read a Globe and Mail review

The book’s subtitle, Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine, describes the 26 alphabetically ordered chapters, starting with “airway.”  

“The book’s essays explore the principles of emergency medicine,” he tells CBC.

“I wanted to explore how hard it can be to exist within a framework that can see so much suffering and pain. You watch people die alone, a lot. You see a lot of sick people and a lot of people who try to refuse care.”

Read an excerpt in U of T Magazine

See another excerpt in the  Toronto Star