The critic’s job comes with its hazards – the threats, the angry letters, and the occasional egg lobbed at the Q&Q windows. But imagine the worst-ever scenario for a book reviewer, in which a sudden numbness creeps into his left arm, he feels chest discomfort and an irregular heart rate, he’s rushed to the emergency room, and the doctor steps back, considers his face, and says, “Wait a second, aren’t you the one who panned my book?”

In reviewing this debut collection of linked stories by Ontario emergency physician Vincent Lam, am I putting my own health at risk? Thankfully, no, for two reasons: doctors can’t refuse assistance to arsonists, drug dealers, or even book reviewers; and more importantly, the book is very good.

Lam’s 12 short stories trace the career arcs of a few young doctors, beginning with their grind through med school; one story explores the uneasy dissection of their first cadaver with attendant black humour. Once they’re out working in the hospitals, Lam’s doctors meet with a range of problems, from mental illness to SARS. Lam’s storylines are a primer for the stresses of young medical professionals, and also illuminate their curious job options. One character is hired by an insurance company that sends planes into foreign countries to bring back the injured, the dead, or the nearly dead.

As in any collection, some parts shine less brightly than others. The stories Lam sets in the ER feel weakest. Each one runs on an energized trajectory of danger, drugs, and specialized language – “get me a Mac-3, check the light, 8-0 tube with a stylet” – but after they pass in a bustle of activity they leave little lingering imprint. Television has already fully milked the frenzy of the ER, and a recent book by Texan physician Frank Huyler, The Blood of Strangers, broke the experience into fragments of lyricism and understated poetry. There is no doubting the drama of an umbilical cord looping around a baby’s neck as it’s born. But we’ve already seen these beds, these situations, from most angles.

Indeed, Lam’s best stories happen away from the emergency room, and Bloodletting really becomes a unique addition to medical literature when he explores how the consequences of these emergencies stretch out into life beyond the hospital. He presents an interconnected web of patients and doctors – the damaged and those barely keeping it together to care for them. In an early story, Lam draws out in fine detail the familial pressures put on Ming, a young Chinese woman determinedly studying to become a doctor, while trying not to trip up on the irrational love she’s feeling for another student. There is Fitzgerald, the young doctor who cannot stop his drinking habit from taking over his life, and Chen, called upon to ease his elderly grandfather toward death. Away from the procedures of the hospital, Lam is able to expand the tone and pace of his fiction, and he finds unique ways of mixing the medical and the personal. The fears, hopes, and disappointments of doctors and patients emerge in the stories in which someone isn’t always barking for an anaesthetist.

Lam has a dry fascination with the human body that surfaces throughout, and not only in the medical situations. A woman working in a seedy Toronto barbershop and massage parlour is so tired of the male body she treats penises “like tubular pimples that needed to be burst.” Perhaps it takes someone in the medical profession – so used to studying the body – to emerge with such fresh ways of describing its functions. Another bonus is that Lam’s writing never carries the whiff of over-researched prose. Descriptions and scenarios are not weighed down with the results of hours spent in the library. Instead, the stories have an offhand sense of truth. (There is a glossary at the back to explain the terms that pop up, but I’d recommend just letting them wash over you while reading.)

Finally – and this is a compliment – this book feels like a first step. Lam knows about the ventricles, but he is still working toward understanding the more mysterious workings of the human heart. He hasn’t quite mastered human nature like that Russian physician Chekhov, but many of these short stories offer a detailed authenticity, a pitch-perfect understanding of the ways in whic young doctors cope, and sometimes don’t. Lam seems to accept that short stories aren’t something learned, like facts from a med-school textbook. This book is evidence of a good writer in motion, learning and growing. Bloodletting, with its scope and nuance and empathy for both sides of the medical equation, is a very, very good start.