In Our Hands

Download or read book In Our Hands written by Arnold Arem and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2004 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Thorough, informative, and warmly modern.” —Kirkus Reviews Over the twenty years that Arnold Arem has worked as a reconstructive hand surgeon, he has reflected on the impact of living with pain and questions of psychic well-being in the face of crippling injury and physical deformity. Many patients have been helped by his mixture of technical skill and an all-too-rare ability to simply listen to them. Arem tells extraordinary stories of the people he has treated in his practice: a boy with a birth defect for whom he fashions opposable thumbs; an elderly woman whose bizarre paralysis he recognizes as psychosomatic, leading to a cure; a man whose spirit remains intact despite the loss of both feet and one hand to Jim Henson’s disease. Above all, In Our Hands evokes the deepest issues of the relationship between the hand and human identity.