Scan barcode
A review by book_concierge
Five Patients: The Hospital Explained by Michael Crichton
3.0
From the back cover: A construction worker in his fifties is seriously injured in the collapse of a scaffold. A middle-aged railroad dispatcher develops a high fever that makes him wildly delirious. A young worker nearly severs his hand from his arm in an accident. A woman traveling alone has persistent chest pain and is treated by a doctor on a TV screen. A mother of three is diagnosed with a life-threatening disease.
My reactions
These five patients’ cases are used to illustrate the workings of a large academic medical center: Massachusetts General Hospital. Crichton, best known for thrillers and the TV show E.R., wrote this nonfiction explanation of how a hospital works when he was barely out of medical school himself – November 1969. I happened to get a 25th anniversary edition, which includes a “new” Author’s Note dated 1994. In that forward he writes: “When I reread the book recently, I was struck by how much in medicine has changed – and also, by how much has not changed. Eventually I decided not to revise the text, but to let it stand as a statement of what medical practice was like in the late 1960s, and how issues in health care were perceived at that time.”
Another twenty years have gone by and Crichton’s comments still ring true. Much has changed, and much remains the same. The system of training new physicians has changed little, though residents no longer have the gruelingly long hours that were the norm when Crichton was writing. Technological advances have certainly changed the way in which certain services are delivered, but third-party payers (i.e. insurance companies, including government programs such as Medicare) have much more to say about what services the patient receives and how. (A friend recently had a mastectomy as an outpatient procedure!)
So, while this work is obviously dated, I still found it interesting.
My reactions
These five patients’ cases are used to illustrate the workings of a large academic medical center: Massachusetts General Hospital. Crichton, best known for thrillers and the TV show E.R., wrote this nonfiction explanation of how a hospital works when he was barely out of medical school himself – November 1969. I happened to get a 25th anniversary edition, which includes a “new” Author’s Note dated 1994. In that forward he writes: “When I reread the book recently, I was struck by how much in medicine has changed – and also, by how much has not changed. Eventually I decided not to revise the text, but to let it stand as a statement of what medical practice was like in the late 1960s, and how issues in health care were perceived at that time.”
Another twenty years have gone by and Crichton’s comments still ring true. Much has changed, and much remains the same. The system of training new physicians has changed little, though residents no longer have the gruelingly long hours that were the norm when Crichton was writing. Technological advances have certainly changed the way in which certain services are delivered, but third-party payers (i.e. insurance companies, including government programs such as Medicare) have much more to say about what services the patient receives and how. (A friend recently had a mastectomy as an outpatient procedure!)
So, while this work is obviously dated, I still found it interesting.