Customer Reviews

The Knife and Gun Club: Scenes from an Emergency Room

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Knife and Gun Club gives a candid and uncensored look into Denver General Hospital's Emergency Room and Paramedic Division. Richards has captured the spirit of the personell of the Denver General ER. As an EMT trained at Denver General and the daughter of one of Denver General's first paramedics, I found this book very accurate and true to life. It spares no detail and gives the true flavor of one of the nations top trauma centers and emergency departments. If you have any interest in the emergency field, I suggest you read this book for a truthful look into an emergency room and the lives of the people who work in the emergency system. This book is fabulous, and very well written. Richards pulls the reader in to Denver General and all its supporting emergency systems. I have never read a better documentation or representation of the way emergency medicine in all its aspects truely is.

Richard's provides an unbiased look into the world of emergency medicine at Denver General hospital and Denver Emergency Medical Services. This book couples full page black & white pictures with interviews with various health proffesionals. A true look at the events and emotions surrounding emergency care.

I am a nurse practitioner who has worked in trauma centers (mostly inner-city ones) for more than 20 years. "The Knife and Gun Club" was not only a trip down memory lane for me but also a decent reflection of the trauma business as it still occurs across the US -- the only really obsolete material in the book is the technology.

We have a higher success rate with really severe injuries now because the science has advanced, but unfortunately the social and economic forces that created the Friday Night Knife and Gun Club have not abated. Rather, they've increased, so the Club now meets every night in most cities in the US, with penetrating trauma (from knives, guns, ice picks, screwdrivers, etc.) increasing for the past 20 years.

If I were to recreate this book in the current system, the only thing I would add is the impact of 48 million uninsured and the change in hospital emergency departments as they have become primary care providers for those uninsured. These are the people who wait for 8, 12, 16 hours to see an ED provider because they cannot afford to see someone before an illness becomes serious.

Richards' book is (and deserves to be) a classic.

This brought back a lot of memories and some very strange feelings. I left Denver General back in 1995 and this brought back a flood of good and bad memories.

This book helped my wife understand what being a Paramedic in a major Downtown city is all about. She was quite shocked about the things she read in the book and didn't realize that is what it is actually like on a day to day basis. I told her that the book just scratched the surface and there were far worse stories of children and the elderly that I don't like to talk about even today.

I didn't like the book's format all that much but I still enjoyed it all the same. If you've worked in an ER or as a EMT Basic / Paramedic then this book is worth the purchase just to have a record of what you did 'back in the day'.

Another nauseous helping of sanctimonious slop from the medical community (who ignores the fact they themselves abort about 3,500 lives per day.) Guns and knives are the problem in our society, eh? What about abortion? Far bigger in scale. All of us run a 20% chance of being aborted before ever being brought to term. I'd say that is a much bigger issue, and you can thank the medical community for that.

"Sir, do you have guns in the house?" the pediatric nurse asks when I bring my kid in for a visit. I sometimes reply, "Ma'am, do you have abortion implements in your office? Better lock those devices up safely, because abortion is the Number One cause of death for people under 18, you know."