Wardlife: The Apprenticeship of a Young Writer as a Hospital Clerk

For nine years Andrew Steinmetz worked as a ward clerk in the Intensive Care Unit and Emergency Department of a major hospital. Wardlife is a series of riveting prose vignettes–intensely observed moments drawn from diaries kept during the nine years he spent as a ward clerk. With character sketches, dialogues, and brief meditations on subjects ranging from the language of poetry to the language of medicine, Wardlife records the hospital experience–the pathos and pain, the humor and horror–of life on the wards. A profound and deeply sympathetic understanding of this unique environment is conveyed. Described are the feel of instruments, the tone of a locating girl’s voice calling code blue, the oddly triumphant grieving of a family watching and singing at a dying father’s bedside, and the complications of various hospital subcultures.