David W. Page, MD, is an American general surgeon and writer best known to fiction writers for Body Trauma: A Writer's Guide to Wounds and Injuries. Professor of Surgery at Tufts University School of Medicine and Director of Student Programs in Surgery at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, he is a trauma care and critical care specialist who has won the Outstanding Teaching in the Clinical Sciences Award from Tufts.
Body Trauma, part of the Writer's Digest Howdunit series, walks fiction writers through the medical realities of physical injury: the four steps in trauma care, skull and brain injuries, the Glasgow Coma Scale, penetrating and blunt neck injuries, the survivable chest injuries that surgeons sometimes call the dirty dozen, what blunt trauma and blades and bullets actually do to abdominal organs, injuries to limbs, bites and stings, impalement, abuse, and how organ donation works. The book lets a novelist work backward from the kind of damage a character will sustain and the survival window for treatment, then write the cause and the consequences with medical accuracy.
Page co-wrote Code Blue: A Writer's Guide to Hospitals (covering the ER, OR, and ICU) with Keith Wilson, MD. He holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine and writes essays and fiction alongside his medical work. His reference books are recommended in crime, medical thriller, and screenwriting programs and have remained in print across multiple editions for nearly thirty years.
