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Reviews tagging 'Gore'
The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder by Charles Graeber
1 review
jhbandcats's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
informative
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
4.0
I initially had a really hard time reading this because I got so frustrated and angry. The book is well-written, well-researched, and fascinating. My problem was that the medical profession - both the hospital administrators and the licensing people - allowed him to kill so many people, perhaps as many as 400, over a period of SIXTEEN YEARS without doing anything to stop him. The structures that should’ve been keeping people safe were complete failures, and the administrations only cared about liability, not patient safety.
The book is divided into two halves - the first is about the sixteen years of murder and the second is about the police investigation. That keeps the events understandable although Cullen was in so many facilities - he kept having to move between hospitals and nursing homes as he’d fall under suspicion - that it’s really difficult to keep it all straight. The police investigation and the writing of this book were a confusing tangle and both succeeded only by focusing on discrete sections at a time.
An excellent entry in true crime and the smaller subset of medical murder, but a horrific indictment of the medical profession as a whole.
The book is divided into two halves - the first is about the sixteen years of murder and the second is about the police investigation. That keeps the events understandable although Cullen was in so many facilities - he kept having to move between hospitals and nursing homes as he’d fall under suspicion - that it’s really difficult to keep it all straight. The police investigation and the writing of this book were a confusing tangle and both succeeded only by focusing on discrete sections at a time.
An excellent entry in true crime and the smaller subset of medical murder, but a horrific indictment of the medical profession as a whole.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Alcoholism, Bullying, Death, Gore, Infidelity, Mental illness, Sexual assault, Blood, Vomit, Medical content, Medical trauma, Suicide attempt, and Murder