Ward 402

Ronald J. Glasser's new volume is completely different from his now famous first book - "365 DAYS" - different, and perhaps even more extraordinary. The scene is the children's ward of a great hospital, and the story a profoundly moving account of a young doctor's involvement in the life of Mary Berquam, an enchanting eleven-year old girl afflicted with leukemia. Dr. Glasser's dramatic narrative reads like a report on what actually happened on the ward after Mary was admitted. And indeed, everything really did happen, he assures us in the forward to his book, "though the events did not all occur in the same sequence, or in the same hospital, or to the same people." When the intern who tells the story examines the child, he is amazed. Mary is so sick it seems incredible to him that she was not hospitalized before. When he learns the reason her father has brought her in now, he is even more astonished. He had dealt with difficult parents before, but never one like this. And thus begins the reeducation of the young physician. He had been trained, as he puts it, to treat hearts and lungs and kidneys. But now Mary, by her very presence, makes him realize that he is dealing not with a case but with a person, not with an isolated patient in the limbo of hospital, but with a child and therefore with parents. "In the midst of all the precision, of laboratory values and X rays, suddenly there were human concerns: grief and heartache, personal problems, economics, distrust, fears, and even anger." "Suddenly there were human concerns." This is the heart of Dr. Glasser's compelling story, that makes it unlike any other "doctor book" we know of. WARD 402 is preeminently a book for our time, a story that touches the lives of all of us today, and that only a dedicated young physician is equipped to tell.