Gold’s Rounds: Medicine, McGill, and Growing Up Jewish in Montreal
Phil Gold
- Publisher : McGill-Queen's University Press (April 15, 2023)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 200 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0228017580
- ISBN-13 : 978-0228017585
Growing
up on St Lawrence Boulevard, Phil Gold never aspired to be a doctor.
But working as an encyclopedia salesman, a bottle washer at Molson, and a
fur-coat schlepper in textile factories helped him realize and embrace
his parents’ desire for him to follow that path.Looking back at his
short wander from the Main to nearby McGill University and the Montreal
General Hospital, Gold coins a new word, fortunome, to evoke his sense
of a lucky life: “Our genome comes from our parents; our environment or
epigenome shapes the expression of who we are; but without a good
fortunome, life’s odds turn against us.” A born storyteller, Gold
recounts the sights and sounds of a bygone era – horse-drawn milk carts,
Yiddish neighbourhoods full of Holocaust survivors, furniture chopped
up to keep the home fires burning, sacks of grain lugged off ships in
the harbour, antisemitism and ethnic street-fighting, the padlocked
doors of the Red Scare, his father’s first car. Gold tells the story of
dating and marrying the love of his life, Evelyn, studying under the
brilliant Sir Arnold Burgen, and his discovery of CEA (carcinoembryonic
antigen) in a clear, fast-moving narrative that grips and fascinates.
Gold’s Rounds also includes unforgettable stories from six decades of
treating patients at the General, scenes from the founding of the famous
Goodman Cancer Institute, and reflections on the physician's role and
the meaning of a good death. By turns funny, wise, and heartrending,
Gold’s memoir of a life well lived will be cherished by both medical
professionals and general readers.
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