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Summary
Summary
Dr. Steven Hatch first came to Liberia in November 2013, to work at a hospital in Monrovia. Six months later, several of the physicians Dr. Hatch had mentored and served with were dead or barely clinging to life, and Ebola had become a world health emergency. Hundreds of victims perished each week; whole families were destroyed in a matter of days; so many died so quickly that the culturally taboo practice of cremation had to be instituted to dispose of the bodies. With little help from the international community and a population ravaged by disease and fear, the war-torn African nation was simply unprepared to deal with the catastrophe. A physician's memoir about the ravages of a terrible disease and the small hospital that fought to contain it, Inferno is also an explanation of the science and biology of Ebola: how it is transmitted and spreads with such ferocity. And as Dr. Hatch notes, while Ebola is temporarily under control, it will inevitably re-emerge--as will other plagues, notably the Zika virus, which the World Health Organization has declared a public health emergency. Inferno is a glimpse into the white-hot center of a crisis that will come again.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Hatch, a physician and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, rivetingly recounts his work in an Ebola treatment unit in Liberia at the height of the deadly West African outbreak in 2014-2015. He breathtakingly narrates his "battle of a lifetime" while retaining a steely-eyed focus on the human tragedy. From the first death Hatch witnesses to the first survival of a patient under his care, he chronicles what it meant to go from "watching the world's leading story to being the world's leading story." Professionally, he appreciates the critical role of nurses and the importance of touch, faces his own failures, and evaluates the good and bad of media coverage. On a personal level, Hatch gives stunning witness to the devastating loss caused by Ebola, including that of a father who survived the virus who then cares for his dying son. "We all knew that the [unit] was a place of hellish misery," yet "despite that knowledge, we were able to keep on with our jobs," Hatch writes. "Our cheer and hope were among our only weapons in the darkness." Hatch's chronicle is a compassionate, clear-eyed, and courageous account of how compassionate medical care proves a formidable force against the ravages of Ebola. Agent: Andy Ross, Andy Ross Agency. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
An American doctor describes his experiences in Liberia during the 2014-2015 Ebola epidemic.Hatch (Infectious Disease and Immunology/Univ. of Massachusetts Medical School; Snowball in a Blizzard: A Physician's Notes on Uncertainty in Medicine, 2016; etc.) first went to Liberia in November 2013, months before the Ebola outbreak began in earnest, to volunteer at the John F. Kennedy Hospital in Monrovia. By the time the first confirmed cases of Ebola were registered in West Africa, Hatch had returned to his life and work in the United States. But he felt such obligation that eventually, after overcoming various bureaucratic hurdles, he returned to Liberia, to volunteer in an Ebola Treatment Unit in Bong County. His deployment lasted six weeks. Hatch narrates those experiences in detail, from the day-to-day problems of shaving, dressing in personal protective equipment in extreme heat, and dehydration to the horrors experienced by his patients, which he witnessed daily. Hatch is a capable writer; his descriptions are fluid, and his voice is engaging. However, he has a tendency to extrapolate at length on issues that are likely to be of less interest to readersthose bureaucratic hurdles, for example. Nor is Hatch entirely successful in achieving the outsized ambitions he lists at the beginning of the book, which include not only analyzing the causes, extent, and impact of the Ebola outbreak, but also the intent to "rob the virus of its metaphorical power, which requires calling attention to the institution of sub-Saharan African slavery and the changes it wrought on at least three continents." Still, Hatch's testimony is a useful addition to the popular literature about the Ebola outbreak. Despite occasional long-windedness, Hatch's analysis is intelligent, nuanced, and tempered, a necessary departure from the panicked response of most American media outlets. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* During the devastating Ebola outbreak in 2013 and 2014, Hatch, a doctor and an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts specializing in infectious disease, traveled to Liberia to work in a temporary hospital. His experiences there and upon his return to the U.S. are the framework for this intensely detailed memoir that gives readers not only insight into the path of destruction wrought by the disease but also Liberia's complicated history with America, it's unique relationship with religion, and how it managed to tackle Ebola in the wake of a horrific civil war. That Hatch accomplishes all of this in an outstandingly well-written, page-turning memoir in which he focuses far more on the people he worked with and treated than on his own feelings is nothing short of a literary miracle. Inferno educates, illuminates, and rivets as Hatch rails against the political circumstances that allowed Ebola to flourish and aims his flinty pen at the U.S. media's condescending determination to make a Liberian story more about Western saviors than African victims. This is a masterful work that deserves sharp notice truly, a game changer that should share a shelf with the works of Philip Gourevitch and Adam Hochschild.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
BY MY COUNT, "Inferno: A Doctor's Ebola Story," by Steven Hatch, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical Sschool, is the second account to be released by an American doctor who treated patients suffering from Ebola in West Africa. Kent Brandy's 2015 memoir, "Called for Life: How Loving Our Neighbor Led Us Into the Heart of the Ebola Epidemic," written with his wife, Amber, follows their faith-inspired journey to serve as medics in Liberia. Other international aid workers are also working on books on the outbreak, but what one hopes for are accounts by Liberia's own response heroes and epidemiologists. There are already too many stories of humanitarian disasters in which local heroes, victims and survivors are subsumed by a foreign protagonist's narrative. Hatch's book is no exception. What could have been a harrowing but important attempt to grapple with an epidemic that sickened more than 28,000 people and killed 5,000 in Liberia alone instead feels hastily written. "This is a horror story. And as if someone from central casting were pulling the strings, this horror story begins with a small child happily playing right outside his home." Hatch tells the story of Emile Ouamouno, a 2-year-old from Meliandou, Guinea, who is widely believed to be Patient Zero. Emile came down with a mysterious illness, possibly passed on by one of the bats that lived in a hollow tree that children played in. He died days later, and within a month, his mother, younger sister and grandmother were dead too. This is just one instance in which Hatch resorts to melodrama when the stories of the outbreak are already sufficiently surreal and very often tragic. From this opening, "Inferno" meanders on, failing to find a coherent voice or strategy to convey the drama of Hatch's experience. Instead of bringing us straight into the hot zone, he drags the reader through pages of potted history of the outbreak and of Liberia's founding by freed American slaves before finally taking us to the treatment unit. Once there, the book picks up as Hatch toils in a constraining yellow hazardous materials suit. His days are long and arduous, and the decisions he must make are heartbreaking - to separate families who have recovered from those who have been infected. In one instance, Hatch has to separate a 6-year-old girl named Josephine from her mother, who tested negative. Josephine looks at him, dressed in his yellow protective suit as though he were a monster. Hatch persists in thinking he is doing the correct thing - until Josephine later dies, "terrified and alone." "Josephine was correct: I was a monster - her own personal monster - at the moment I escorted her on what would be her final journey," he writes. "And I had patted myself on the back at the time, thinking myself so swell for being such a sensitive and caring physician, even as I facilitated a horror from which Josephine's mother will never fully recover. My smugness gnawed at me for weeks after she died, then months. It gnaws at me still." Gnaw it might, but Hatch never lingers more than a line or two on such moments. He gives us the barest glimpses into his feelings and doesn't speak to many survivors about their experiences. Stranger still, Hatch's reasons for going to Liberia are never made fully clear. He says he didn't expect to come back alive; given that he had a wife and two children, this decision feels puzzling at best. We know only that he was inspired by a Liberian colleague, Dr. Abraham Borbor, who worked at a grim hospital in Monrovia that Liberians regarded as the final destination before death. Borbor later succumbed to Ebola himself, and while his heroism is obvious, we never get a vivid sense of the man himself and why Hatch felt so compelled by his example. In the final chapter Hatch meditates on the newfound love of a Liberian and an expat colleague and the weddings that abound in Monrovia as the outbreak is finally coming to an end. These weddings are "bookends," he writes, "assertions that, whatever setbacks lay ahead, happiness and contentment would still triumph." However much you'd like to agree, "Inferno" leaves you with the unsettling feeling that both Liberia and Hatch have yet to fully understand the horror of what they have witnessed. Liberians rarely speak about Ebola today; the grief is still too raw. Despite significant progress in the health sector, hospitals and clinics still struggle with hygiene, and Liberians continue to die of preventable illnesses. Even three years later, we know little about what triggered the outbreak of a virus that burned the region and could emerge again. Hatch's days Eire long and arduous, and the decisions he and the other doctors and nurses often have to make are heartbreaking. CLAIR MACDOUGALL is a journalist based in Monrovia, Liberia. She reported for The Times during the Ebola outbreak.
Library Journal Review
Hatch's (medicine, Univ. of Massachusetts) powerful, at times gut-wrenching memoir of his time working in West -Africa to treat Ebola weaves a history of Liberia, public health information, and searing stories of death, hope, and heartbreak. The author narrates a doctor's ethical and professional commitment-how and why he felt so compelled to treat the outbreak. He lucidly and movingly describes his daily work on the Ebola treatment unit, and the costs and rewards of trying to help others regain health in a region with few medical resources, where technologies taken for granted in more developed countries are simply not available. Along with the story it tells of disease, this title also reveals the ways that war, colonialism, and dictatorships have affected health care in Liberia, and in different ways, the state of health in Africa as a whole. Hatch's writing is elegant, and at times deeply moving as he shares the pathos of his patients, the staff of the treatment unit, and his own hopes and frustrations. -VERDICT Readers who are interested in global health, medical education, and biographies in general will be moved by this account for its humanity, honesty, and lucid writing. [See Prepub Alert, 9/19/16.]-Aaron Klink, Duke Univ., Durham, NC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction: The Abandonment of Unwholesome Thoughts | p. 1 |
| 1 The Vestibule | p. 13 |
| 2 Preparing for the End of the World | p. 27 |
| 3 The Blue World | p. 69 |
| 4 Inferno | p. 95 |
| 5 The Unbearable Cry | p. 133 |
| 6 Behold, a Pale Horse | p. 155 |
| 7 Night | p. 183 |
| 8 Purgatory | p. 205 |
| 9 Mawah | p. 237 |
| Epilogue: Sunset, Sunrise | p. 273 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 283 |
| Bibliography | p. 289 |
| Index | p. 295 |