On Call in the Arctic

by Thomas J Sims

Overview

The fish-out-of-water stories of Northern Exposure and Doc Martin meet the rough-and-rugged setting of the Discovery Channel’s Alaskan Bush People in Thomas J. Sims’s On Call in the Arctic, where the author relates his incredible experience saving lives in one of the most remote outposts in North America.Imagine a young doctor, trained in the latest medical knowledge and state-of-the-art equipment, suddenly transported back to one of the world’s most isolated and unforgiving environments—Nome, Alaska. Dr. Sims’ plans to become a pediatric surgeon drastically changed when, on the eve of being drafted into the Army to serve as a M.A.S.H. surgeon in Vietnam, he was offered a commission in the U.S. Public Health for assignment in Anchorage, Alaska.In order to do his job, Dr. Sims had to overcome racism, cultural prejudices, and hostility from those who would like to see him sent packing. On Call in the Arctic reveals the thrills and the terrors of frontier medicine, where Dr. Sims must rely upon his instincts, improvise, and persevere against all odds in order to help his patients on the icy shores of the Bering Sea.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681779164
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	09/04/2018
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	726,096
File size:	30 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Thomas J. Sims, M.D. is a writer and actor who studied Zoology and Creative Writing at UCLA before attending medical school at Creighton University. After leaving Alaska, he began a private medical practice and began to write and act. He now runs a medical consultation practice and the website DocTalkToday.com. He lives in Bend, Oregon.

Editorial Reviews

07/09/2018
In his lively and touching debut, Sims recounts his year-and-a-half stay as a doctor in Alaska. As he neared the end of his internship at UCLA in 1971, Sims accepted a pediatric physician job with the U.S. Public Health Service and was assigned work in the remote arctic town of Nome. There, with his pregnant wife and young daughter, Sims served as the town’s lone doctor and encountered bureaucratic obstructions from the administrator at the hospital where he worked; local skepticism after his predecessor impregnated an Eskimo girl, then planned to give her an abortion; and a lack of modern medical instruments and drugs. Buoyed by his steadfast wife, Pat, and an instinctive gift for seat-of-his-pants-doctoring, Sims delivered babies, took out appendixes, and treated broken limbs; he eventually became a part of the community and a lifeline for far-flung Eskimo villages. His writing moves at a rapid-pace, in step with the life-and-death tales he recounts, slowing down only to focus on such moving occasions as the birth of a three-pound baby and the painful death of a hospital colleague. Sims has delivered a captivating account of practicing medicine in the furthest reaches of the U.S. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

The best parts of the memoir are, without doubt, the fast-paced accounts of some of the doctor’s medical cases and situations, [which are] fascinating and often harrowing.  It’s apparent that Sims’s time in Nome made a great impression on him.

The Anchorage Daily News