SLCL Medical Arts Series Presents ER Doctor and Health Care Advocate Farzon Nahvi
St. Louis County Library and the JCC of St. Louis are pleased to host an SLCL Authors @ the J event with Dr. Farzon Nahvi, author of “Code Grey: Death, Life, and Uncertainty in the ER.”
The event is presented by the Arthur Gale Medical Arts Lecture Series in partnership with the Missouri chapter of Physicians for a National Health Plan. Dr. Nahvi will be in conversation with Dr. Ed Weisbart, national board member and Missouri chair for PNHP.
The event will take place on Tuesday, March 21 at 7:00 p.m. at the JCC’s Staenberg Family Center – Mirowitz Performing Arts Center, 2 Millstone Campus Drive, St. Louis, MO 63146. The program is free and open to the public.
Books will be available for purchase at the event from Left Bank Books.
Dr. Farzon Nahvi’s “Code Gray” is a narrative-driven medical memoir that places you directly in the crucible of urgent life-or-death decision-making, offering insights that can help us cope at a time when the world around us appears to be falling apart.
In the tradition of books by such bestselling physician-authors as Atul Gawande, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Danielle Ofri, this beautifully written memoir by an emergency room doctor takes place during one of his routine shifts at an urban ER. Intimately narrated as it follows the experiences of real patients, it is filled with fascinating, adrenaline-pumping scenes of rescues and deaths, and the critical, often excruciating follow-through in caring for the patients’ families.
“Code Gray” weaves in stories that explore everything from the early days of the Covid outbreak to the perennial glaring inequities of our healthcare system. It offers an unforgettable portrait of challenges so profound, powerful, and extreme that normal ethical and medical frameworks prove inadequate. By inviting the reader to experience what it is like to work a shift in the ER, we are forced to test our core beliefs and principles. Often, there are no clear answers to these challenges posed in the ER. Through through this process, we can come to appreciate just how complicated, emotional, unpredictable—and yet strikingly beautiful—life can be.
Farzon Nahvi is an ER physician at Concord Hospital in Concord, New Hampshire, and a clinical assistant professor of emergency medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. He is a graduate of Cornell University and NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He has written for the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, New York magazine, and other publications. In April 2019, he testified as an expert witness before Congress in the nation’s first Medicare for All hearing.
The Arthur Gale Medical Arts Lecture Series at the St. Louis County Library was founded in 2015 by Dr. Arthur Gale with the purpose of increasing the public's knowledge and understanding of medicine and health care.
Program sites are accessible. With at least two weeks' notice, accommodations will be made for persons with disabilities. Call 314-994-3300 or contact us.