The book is a interesting look into emergency general surgery and trauma surgery although the climax of the book being someone shot in the head is sort of anticlimactic since trauma surgery only plays a partial role by acting as primary while in that case neurosurgery does the heavy lifting. You can see that he's a skilled politician using a senator's attack to argue for more resources to trauma though with a lot of applied statistics to the younger ages versus more chronic diseases of age which is notable in and of itself.

The described rush of a thoracotomy is real though.