The Lost Art

by Andrew Ross

Set over the course of one fateful weekend in the near dystopic future, The Lost Art focuses on three resident physicians in a Southern academic hospital attempting to care for the dying nephew of a powerful senator while simultaneously fighting against the entrenched medical and political system that dictates their practice.

When Mark Vanderhorst, the nephew of powerful South Carolina state senator Jackson Vanderhorst, is forced to come to the emergency department on a busy Friday evening for abdominal pain, the working emergency resident physician, Dr. Tom Anderson, quickly sees him at the end of his shift. Despite an apparent diagnosis of appendicitis, Mark is mistakenly placed on the internal medicine service overnight where he rapidly deteriorates and dies the following evening on the operating table. What starts out as a simple mistake is eventually revealed as a series of preventable errors, made possible in large part by the heavy oversight of hospital administration responding to recent legislative changes dictating how medicine is to be practiced; new laws recently slammed through the machinery of government by none other then Jackson Vanderhorst himself. Throughout the course of this fateful weekend Dr. Anderson and two of his closest friends, Dr. Eric Lingerfelt of internal medicine and Dr. Elizabeth Templeton of general surgery, do everything in their power against the seemingly endless red tape to save Mark’s life.
Told in three sections, each section told through the eyes of one of the three main protagonists, the story unfolds to reveal the true reasons for Mark’s death and the profound reverberating effects this will have on Tom, Eric and Elizabeth.

The Lost Art is a work of literary fiction weighing in at roughly 90,000 words. I am an emergency medicine physician three years out of training and currently work in Savannah, GA.

566 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 14, 2014

About the author

Andrew Ross is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and a social activist. A contributor to The Nation, the Village Voice, New York Times, and Artforum, he is the author of many books, including, most recently, Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City and Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times.