Perhaps the most difficult words parents will ever hear are "Your child is critically ill." Now Dr. Christopher Johnson, the former director of Mayo Clinic's Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, gives parents a helpful guide to answering the painful questions that come when a child is critically ill. The book's opening chapter lays out the full array of treatments that today's medical science can offer to severely ill children. The author then details what the technological limits are and how parents must sometimes think out of the box to save a child's life. To illustrate each chapter, Johnson draws on cases from his own practice, telling of children who beat the odds — a good reminder to parents that miracles do happen.
I am a native of Winona, Minnesota. I received my undergraduate education in history and religion at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where I was elected to phi beta kappa and graduated magna cum laude in 1974. I earned my Doctor of Medicine degree in 1978 from Mayo Medical School in Rochester, Minnesota. I subsequently trained in general pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Children's Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, followed by training in pediatric infectious diseases and pediatric critical care medicine at the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine. I am certified by the American Board of Pediatrics in both general pediatrics and in pediatric critical care medicine, and am a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
I have had a long-standing interest in how medical practice evolved in America and how it reached its present state of affairs. Reflecting that interest, I earned a Master of Arts degree in History of Medicine from the University of Minnesota for my work on that subject, and am a member of the American Association for the History of Medicine.
I have practiced pediatric critical care medicine for nearly thirty years. I was for many years Director of the Pediatric Critical Care Service at the Mayo Clinic and Professor of Pediatrics at Mayo Medical School, as well as Director of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at Mayo Eugenio Litta Children's Hospital. While on the faculty at Mayo, I was the author of over fifty scientific papers and book chapters in medical texts, and was the recipient of major grant awards from the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, and the March of Dimes Foundation. I now devote my time to practicing pediatric critical care as President of Pediatric Intensive Care Associates, P.C., and to writing about medicine for general readers.
