Butcher

＂In the 1840s, a young man named Silas Weir begins practicing medicine in Pennsylvania. Though he is considered inept by family, neighbors, and even his mentor, Dr. Weir discovers he has a gift for phlebotomy, treating patients by bleeding them to purify their bodies. But when an experimental procedure goes horribly wrong, Dr. Weir is forced to start over, relocating his family to Trenton, New Jersey, and taking a position at the New Jersey State Asylum for Female Lunatics. There, in the hopes of proving his detractors wrong, Dr. Weir continues practicing dangerous procedures, and soon becomes infatuated with Brigit - a pregnant woman he treats - whom he tries to take her under his wing as an apprentice. As Dr. Weir’s experiments grow more intense - and as he isolates himself from his family and the world beyond the facility - he grows obsessed with Brigit and the other residents who remain at his mercy, and before long, establishes himself as ＂the father of gyno-psychiatry.＂＂--

JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award, the Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the Prix Femina, and the Cino Del Duca World Prize for Literature. She has been nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, and the New York Times best seller The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities emerita at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.