"Something for the Pain has everything you want in a medical memoir: urgencies, emergencies, life-or-death. Austin, writer as much as physician, can turn the simplest procedure into an occasion for elegy, paean, or profound meditation, phrased with the elegance of a Thoreau. Blood, yes, and pain aplenty--this is a book about the body. But it is also about the spirit, about trauma in all its definitions, about what it costs to heal and be a healer, what it truly means to save a life.".