What happens when medicine stops being simply about the doctor and the patient?
Jack Roberts believes medicine is more than a profession. It is a calling.
That belief began in childhood, when a pioneering heart surgeon saved the life of Jack's baby brother and forever changed the course of his own. Decades later, Jack has become a respected pediatric heart surgeon himself, devoting his life to children whose survival may depend upon the decisions he makes.
But the medicine Jack entered is changing.
As the twenty-first century begins, hospitals increasingly operate as businesses. Government regulations, insurance companies, reimbursement policies, administrators, and electronic systems begin inserting themselves into decisions once made between physicians and their patients. Jack finds himself fighting not only disease, but a healthcare system increasingly at odds with everything he believes medicine should be.
Then his work takes him beyond the American healthcare system and into Nicaragua, where children may have no access to lifesaving treatment at all. What Jack encounters there forces him to confront an even larger question: When you possess the ability to save another human life, how far does your obligation to that person extend?
Around him unfolds the life of a family-Jack's enduring marriage to Elaina, his relationship with the son who may someday follow him into medicine, and the patients, colleagues, friends, and strangers whose lives become unexpectedly intertwined with his own.
The Calling is the first novel in the six-book A Surgeon's Heart series, a multigenerational medical family saga spanning decades of extraordinary change in American medicine.
Written by a surgeon with more than forty years of experience caring for patients, it takes readers beyond the operating room and into a world most patients never see-where compassion, economics, technology, politics, faith, family, and the business of healthcare increasingly collide.
Before there can be a conflict, a crisis, a choice, a challenge, or a commitment, there must first be a calling.