Author of The Big Free
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Martha B. Boone is a private practice urologist, practicing in Atlanta, GA. The Big Free is her first published work of fiction and combines medical humor and historical fiction in an urban hospital. She did her surgical and urology training in New Orleans at Tulane and worked for six years at Charity Hospital. She is one of the first one hundred women in the world trained in urology. Dr. Boone has been a guest on Fox News to discuss the effect the Affordable Care Act had on doctors and has been interviewed by the Heritage Foundation in which she states that she has become politically active “to take good care of my patients, so that added a whole other element to the life of being a doctor.” The Daily Signal, the news organization for the Heritage Foundation, states that Boone leads a grassroots campaign against Obamacare because her livelihood depends on it. Obamacare changed the lives of private-practice doctors, many of whom were forced to give up their practice and become partners with larger hospital systems.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The “Big Free” is Charity Hospital and it’s 1982 in New Orleans, and Charity is a big medical free-for-all. Elizabeth Roberts, the heroine, is one of the first women in the toughest surgery department in America. With her pearls and her pink plaid socks, she doesn’t fit in …at first. Half the doctors who start the surgery program there never finish. Nothing in her proper southern upbringing prepares Elizabeth for the violence, debauchery and intensity of inner city trauma surgery. The Big Free is filled with unforgettable characters living the best and the worst New Orleans has to offer. And The Big Free describes the medical humor and drama in the life of one of the first women surgeons in the busiest trauma surgery program in New Orleans, one of the busiest and best in the world. The excitement and dark humor of the inner city emergency room is the background for this coming of age story. Only a great story teller with inside knowledge can capture the intimacy of the lives of doctors, nurses and their patients. Readers will laugh and cry and long to know more of the spirited, young, female-doctor protagonist.
Elizabeth learns more in six months at Charity than she learned in four years of medical school in Charleston, SC. Will she make the cut, or will fear, exhaustion from the grueling pace, and disgust of the senseless violence prove too much? She has fascinating helpers on her journey. A tough, but fair professor of Trauma, a bossy Creole nurse, an effeminate Vietnam veteran technician, chauvinistic male coworkers, and frightened and brave patients mold the young doctor. You will laugh and cry and love the characters.
The Big Free is filled with the flavors that are only New Orleans. It is a coming of age story and is told as only a true medical insider can tell.
“I don’t know if being a surgeon is for me or not. Maybe, it is just all too much,” said Dr. Roberts. Come on the journey to see if this compassionate young woman makes the surgery intern cut, or not.
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
The Big Free by Martha B. Boone was released by Morgan James Publishing in January. F
Morgan James publishes trade quality titles designed to educate, encourage, inspire, or entertain readers with current, consistent, relevant topics that are available everywhere books are sold. (www.MorganJamesPublishing.com)