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In Our Hands: A Hand Surgeon's Tales of the Body's Most Exquisite Instrument
“Thorough, informative, and warmly modern.” — Kirkus Reviews
Over the twenty years that Arnold Arem has worked as a reconstructive hand surgeon, he has reflected on the impact of living with pain and questions of psychic well-being in the face of crippling injury and physical deformity. Many patients have been helped by his mixture of technical skill and an all-too-rare ability to simply listen to them.
Arem tells extraordinary stories of the people he has treated in his a boy with a birth defect for whom he fashions opposable thumbs; an elderly woman whose bizarre paralysis he recognizes as psychosomatic, leading to a cure; a man whose spirit remains intact despite the loss of both feet and one hand to Jim Henson’s disease.
Above all, In Our Hands evokes the deepest issues of the relationship between the hand and human identity.
Over the twenty years that Arnold Arem has worked as a reconstructive hand surgeon, he has reflected on the impact of living with pain and questions of psychic well-being in the face of crippling injury and physical deformity. Many patients have been helped by his mixture of technical skill and an all-too-rare ability to simply listen to them.
Arem tells extraordinary stories of the people he has treated in his a boy with a birth defect for whom he fashions opposable thumbs; an elderly woman whose bizarre paralysis he recognizes as psychosomatic, leading to a cure; a man whose spirit remains intact despite the loss of both feet and one hand to Jim Henson’s disease.
Above all, In Our Hands evokes the deepest issues of the relationship between the hand and human identity.
288 pages, Paperback
First published September 10, 2002
8 people want to read
About the author
Arnold Arem
1 bookArnold Arem, M.D., clinical associate professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and clinical associate in surgery at the University of New Mexico, has been a reconstructive hand surgeon for over twenty years. He is an international lecturer and educator and has also served as an industrial consultant for companies such as IBM and Marion-Dow Laboratories. He is the author of numerous scientific articles. In Our Hands is his first book. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 3, 2012
Last night over dinner, my partner and I discussed the vagaries of Goodreads' star rating. In particular, we talked about the tendency to give extra stars to a book that is on a subject that especially interests us, even if the book is poorly written or lacking in substance. Arnold Arem's In Our Hands: A Hand Surgeon's Tales of the Body's Most Exquisite Instrument is the perfect example of a book that I appreciated more for its subject matter--and my particular interest in that subject matter as a person who has had half a dozen hand surgeries--than for its quality.
Arem divides his book into two parts. The first part contains a series of cases in which Arem meets a patient with a hand deformity or disease and must figure out how to address the problem surgically. The second part contains a series of short essays on different physiological and symbolic aspects of the hand, ranging from healing by laying on of hands, to phantom limb pain, to the mechanics of a hand missing its thumb.
I loved reading the cases because, since I had hand surgery as an infant, I don't remember much about interacting with the doctors and surgeons who worked on my hands, and what I was looking for in this book was a window into how those doctors might have seen my case. I was curious about the hand surgeon's context--what is it like to operate on people's hands? What is difficult about it? What is easy? What is unusual? What is mundane? Reading Arem's selection of cases gave me a sense of possible answers to those questions as Arem amputated a rattlesnake-bitten digit, turned an index finger into a thumb, grafted skin to cover a badly burnt hand, and more.
I'm really glad that Arem wrote this book because this look into a hand surgeon's practice is very meaningful to me. On the downside, Arem's writing style is not as polished as more popular medical writers like Atul Gawande or Mary Roach. The dialogue is cheesy and stilted in parts. In addition, there were several times when Arem's old-fashioned style reinforced my mistaken belief that the book had been published in the 1970s rather than 2002--such as when he goes to notable lengths to imply that a patient is a lesbian rather than saying so outright. Or when he describes a guy dumping his college girlfriend after she loses some digits because he's worried what his friends will think "if we go dancing. If we give dinner parties"--I mean, doesn't that sound like something straight out of the 1950s or 60s? Though to be fair, I'm not totally sure in that case whether it was Arem's writing that struck me as so old-fashioned, or the boyfriend's prejudice.
I also have to confess that Arem lost me in some of his essays. I had trouble following what he was saying in parts, and I felt that some of the essays were too quick and shallow, like Wikipedia articles, while others were too esoteric.
BUT-but, in spite of all that--that just aren't that many books about hand surgeons! So I'm glad that this one is here! I'm glad that Arem wrote it, and I'm glad that I read it. By coincidence, I had just for the first time obtained a copy of my medical records from my hand surgeries a few weeks after reading this book. When I read the descriptions of the surgeries the surgeons performed on me as an infant--the syndactyly separation, the skin grafts, the toe-to-thumb transplant--I could imagine those surgeons and their work better because of having read In Our Hands. I could even understand some of the medical context, like the two hour tourniquet limit on hand surgeries, that I wouldn't have been able to without having read Arem's book. So I am very grateful for that. Thanks, Dr. Arem!
Arem divides his book into two parts. The first part contains a series of cases in which Arem meets a patient with a hand deformity or disease and must figure out how to address the problem surgically. The second part contains a series of short essays on different physiological and symbolic aspects of the hand, ranging from healing by laying on of hands, to phantom limb pain, to the mechanics of a hand missing its thumb.
I loved reading the cases because, since I had hand surgery as an infant, I don't remember much about interacting with the doctors and surgeons who worked on my hands, and what I was looking for in this book was a window into how those doctors might have seen my case. I was curious about the hand surgeon's context--what is it like to operate on people's hands? What is difficult about it? What is easy? What is unusual? What is mundane? Reading Arem's selection of cases gave me a sense of possible answers to those questions as Arem amputated a rattlesnake-bitten digit, turned an index finger into a thumb, grafted skin to cover a badly burnt hand, and more.
I'm really glad that Arem wrote this book because this look into a hand surgeon's practice is very meaningful to me. On the downside, Arem's writing style is not as polished as more popular medical writers like Atul Gawande or Mary Roach. The dialogue is cheesy and stilted in parts. In addition, there were several times when Arem's old-fashioned style reinforced my mistaken belief that the book had been published in the 1970s rather than 2002--such as when he goes to notable lengths to imply that a patient is a lesbian rather than saying so outright. Or when he describes a guy dumping his college girlfriend after she loses some digits because he's worried what his friends will think "if we go dancing. If we give dinner parties"--I mean, doesn't that sound like something straight out of the 1950s or 60s? Though to be fair, I'm not totally sure in that case whether it was Arem's writing that struck me as so old-fashioned, or the boyfriend's prejudice.
I also have to confess that Arem lost me in some of his essays. I had trouble following what he was saying in parts, and I felt that some of the essays were too quick and shallow, like Wikipedia articles, while others were too esoteric.
BUT-but, in spite of all that--that just aren't that many books about hand surgeons! So I'm glad that this one is here! I'm glad that Arem wrote it, and I'm glad that I read it. By coincidence, I had just for the first time obtained a copy of my medical records from my hand surgeries a few weeks after reading this book. When I read the descriptions of the surgeries the surgeons performed on me as an infant--the syndactyly separation, the skin grafts, the toe-to-thumb transplant--I could imagine those surgeons and their work better because of having read In Our Hands. I could even understand some of the medical context, like the two hour tourniquet limit on hand surgeries, that I wouldn't have been able to without having read Arem's book. So I am very grateful for that. Thanks, Dr. Arem!
July 13, 2016
The book is divided into two parts, one with stories from the author's practice, and one called "An Informal History of the Hand."
The first part was readable and very interesting. The author is endearingly enthusiastic about hands and his job. He sounds like an extremely good hand surgeon. He genuinely likes all the patients he describes, including difficult people, and is good at explaining pros and cons of possible actions with them. So what's wrong? First, he puts a lot of explanations into dialogue, a pet peeve of mine. Nobody would talk like that, and it should have been handled differently. More seriously, each patient is a walking stereotype. We have the tough desert rat, the outspoken Italian woman, the tough lesbian couple, the non-English-speaking Mexican family, and more. Though they're all portrayed positively, they each speak in dialect, and act accordingly. The author must have thought it would make the stories entertaining, but it's more cringeworthy. And gender stereotypes. The one that really got to me was the Hispanic druggie mom of a small patient; when she came into his office, she "looked like a prostitute." Just...no.
The second half of the book was a mishmash of a few interesting facts about the hand and a lot of peripherally-related...I want to say junk, but some of it was true and of interest. In the first chapter of this section, he talks about sign language and says it serves "more than sixteen million deaf people in the United States alone." I googled, and depending on the definition, there are 600,000 to 6,000,000 deaf people in the USA, mostly over 65, and less than 500,000 of them use sign language at home (per the Gallaudet site; he didn't reference a source). At that point, I stopped believing anything other than physical facts about the hand, because he knows that area himself. Except for those parts, it reads like he got some materials an wrote a few reports. At several points he went full woo--starting with Therapeutic Touch (which involves little to no actual touch) and going on to all kinds of other "alternative" stuff. I won't go off on it all, but even psi powers and orgone were mentioned.
So, maybe three stars for the first part, but less than zero for the second.
One thing I took away with me: If you don't have a thumb, you can't grasp. Surgery can turn around your pointer finger and make it function as a thumb. Wow!
The first part was readable and very interesting. The author is endearingly enthusiastic about hands and his job. He sounds like an extremely good hand surgeon. He genuinely likes all the patients he describes, including difficult people, and is good at explaining pros and cons of possible actions with them. So what's wrong? First, he puts a lot of explanations into dialogue, a pet peeve of mine. Nobody would talk like that, and it should have been handled differently. More seriously, each patient is a walking stereotype. We have the tough desert rat, the outspoken Italian woman, the tough lesbian couple, the non-English-speaking Mexican family, and more. Though they're all portrayed positively, they each speak in dialect, and act accordingly. The author must have thought it would make the stories entertaining, but it's more cringeworthy. And gender stereotypes. The one that really got to me was the Hispanic druggie mom of a small patient; when she came into his office, she "looked like a prostitute." Just...no.
The second half of the book was a mishmash of a few interesting facts about the hand and a lot of peripherally-related...I want to say junk, but some of it was true and of interest. In the first chapter of this section, he talks about sign language and says it serves "more than sixteen million deaf people in the United States alone." I googled, and depending on the definition, there are 600,000 to 6,000,000 deaf people in the USA, mostly over 65, and less than 500,000 of them use sign language at home (per the Gallaudet site; he didn't reference a source). At that point, I stopped believing anything other than physical facts about the hand, because he knows that area himself. Except for those parts, it reads like he got some materials an wrote a few reports. At several points he went full woo--starting with Therapeutic Touch (which involves little to no actual touch) and going on to all kinds of other "alternative" stuff. I won't go off on it all, but even psi powers and orgone were mentioned.
So, maybe three stars for the first part, but less than zero for the second.
One thing I took away with me: If you don't have a thumb, you can't grasp. Surgery can turn around your pointer finger and make it function as a thumb. Wow!
August 6, 2015
This isn't the type of book you read for fun. You read for answers, or hope, or inspiration, or pure curiosity. For me, it was one of the books I read for a mixture of hand education and for personal reasons. I loved the beginning half of each person and their story. The second half bored me a bit wit all the unnecessary connections drawn between history and religion and hands. Overall, it was very informative but some of it is obviously outdated because the medical field changes so rapidly.
June 2, 2009
Much to anecdotal, not enough surgery for my taste.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews