Assessment:
Idea: Polisetti’s narrative, which includes 21 vignettes about the unusual or worrisome patient cases she has come across while in training to be a doctor or once she has become one, moves along at a decent pace as the reader is enticed to turn the pages not knowing what will come next and wanting to know each vignette’s and patient’s outcome.
Prose/Style: Polisetti’s prose is readable and concise and to the point. Her vignette-style of telling her story can at times be a bit confusing as it jumps around in its chronology. The narrative’s tone is candid about mistakes the author has made and self-examining in its scope. It’s a bit as if she’s confiding to the reader, and she often ends each chapter or vignette with a concluding thought or lesson that helps the reader understand her takeaway from it.
Originality: Polisetti’s vignettes about her patient cases are often engaging and eye-opening, as many result in terrible consequences and deaths that move the reader. A bit more development of the narrative and author would have benefitted the book and made it rise above convention. The work also ends somewhat abruptly; a concluding chapter or vignette may offer greater closure.
Character Development/Execution: Polisetti is the main character of her narrative and revelations come about gradually and subtly. Her focus is more on the cases and patients she sees whose backgrounds and situations she describes quite aptly. Learning about Polisetti through these case situations piques the reader’s interest.
Date Submitted: January 07, 2021
While reading the book, you will feel waves of emotions gripping your mind every now and then. You will be able to realize the tiring hard work and devotion that the medical profession demands. You might even feel more empathetic towards doctors and people in general. But most importantly, the book ‘Dr. Insomniac’ will leave you with some great life lessons. You would want to introspect in order to solve the moral dilemmas that you might experience. So even if you are not connected to the medical profession, ‘Dr. Insomniac’ would surely be a good read. And if you are a medical student or a medical professional, then you would definitely enjoy reading this collection of twenty- one amazing short stories.
Sometimes soul-searching and often gruesome, Dr. Insomniac is one of those medical memoirs of which you swear you’ll just devour one more chapter late at night until, before you know it, dawn is peeping through the curtains. It’s short but memorable. Samatha Polisetti manages to pack a lifetime of adventures into a few chapters, from the perspective of a young doctor in India working in many branches of medicine. The gender bias in the medical hierarchy and in the country in general is disturbing, and the horrors the author both observes and creates (as a result of long hours and an overwhelming workload) again have to be seen from a cultural perspective.
‘It’s ironic how the victim becomes the accused in an Indian family, especially if the victim is “a woman who fell in love.”’ Fascinating.
