Samuel Shem at Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store welcomes SAMUEL SHEM—Professor in Medical Humanities at NYU School of Medicine and novelist—for a discussion of his new novel Our Hospital.

About Our Hospital

After the tragic climax of Man's 4th Best Hospital, four doctors have left practicing medicine. But with COVID-19 sweeping the country, they come together to help the small town of Columbia, New York. The doctors and nurses are buckling as they battle both a raging pandemic and the financial woes facing small hospitals everywhere. But no matter what's happening in the world, babies are born, people fall in love, and doctors will do anything to save their patients.

Our Hospital reveals the daily struggle of fighting a pandemic and its personal impact on healthcare workers young and old, who are terrified, exhausted . . . and determined, somehow, to prevail.

Praise for Our Hospital

“Fifty years ago, Shem’s first novel—The House of God—became the iconic book to help humanize medical training. Our Hospital is the fourth in the series and equally riveting, roaring with laughter. It shows how nurses, doctors, and other health professionals—in the face of fierce challenges—can and must stay human.” —Dr. Leana Wen, emergency physician, CNN medical analyst, author of Lifelines: A Doctor's Journey in the Fight for Public Health

"Our Hospital captures the emotions of millions of clinicians who bore witness and served during the COVID pandemic . . . [Shem] brilliantly captures the distress caregivers experienced—and yet triumphed . . . Patient centeredness, compassion and human caring is woven in throughout the book.“ —Debra Albert, Chief Nursing Officer, NYU Langone Health

“We've barely begun to assimilate the impacts of COVID-19 on our culture, economy, politics—but some of the most important lessons are for the practice of medicine. Who better than Samuel Shem to once again combine the very real and the very funny? This is a deeply uncynical book." —Bill McKibben, Third Act, bestselling author of The End of Nature

Mask Policy

Masks are encouraged but not required for this event.