The Poison Doctor

Book excerpt: Whatever the case, anxiety, difficult to pin down, is linked to the fact that death awaits us, rich, poor, powerful, or homeless. Dr. Bouthillier, an oncologist, touches death with his fingertips every day. In this autobiographically influenced novel, we follow Dr. Bouthillier as he converses with and reflects upon his colleagues and his varied, multicultural roster of cancer patients. One hospital resident, a rabbi—nicknamed “the love rabbi” for his reputation as a womanizer—becomes the doctor’s sounding board and mentor in the probing of life’s greatest mysteries: Why is there so much suffering? What do we owe to one another? What are we meant to do with our knowledge of death? From the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal to a cancer clinic in Butaro, Rwanda, these intimate vignettes reveal the obscure beauty of human suffering in all its diversity. Devastatingly candid and rich with compassion, The Poison Doctor is a philosophical, spiritual, and historical study of this absurd existence to which we cling with all our strength, united—whoever we are, wherever we come from—in the fear of disappearing from all we know.