Five Patients

Rating:
Summary: AN ENORMOUS WASTE OF TIME
Review: This book is nothing more than dry reading all the way. I got nothing against hospital histories ( I bought the book, after all !! ) but this so called " serious " analysys of American medical situation is a joke. It seems more like a diary chenged into a book to make some money. It doens't reveal any new grounds on medicine, it doesn't give any lesson in medicine's history, nothing !

Rating:
Summary: Don't expect ER
Review: You will probably have the wrong impression of what this book consists of before you read it; I did. Some may think, or hope, that it is an ER-type medical thriller. It is not. Some, as I did, may think that it takes the cases of five individual patients and goes into a detailed description of how they were treated and cured. It does not. What the book actually does consist of is a series of five separate medical cases that are used to illustrate larger aspects of the hospital in general. The five cases average about 30 pages apiece, with about 4 or 5 pages of that going into the actual details of the case. The book is somewhat interesting: it goes into detail about the inner workings of a hospital that those outside of the medical profession probably know next to nothing about. This glimpse into the academic medical community is informative and makes for fairly interesting reading. The writing is dry and formal, often quite technical, which will, no doubt, turn off those who read Crichton merely for his page-turning suspense. Though the book has its merits, as mentioned above, one is ever aware, while reading it, that the book was written in 1969. Though some points of it are still valid and interesting, and Crichton's writing is always worth reading, it is inescapably quite outdated. One may get the most out of it by using it as a snapshot of how medicine was 30+ years ago. Of course, at any rate, this is a minor work in Crichton's canon. Reccommended only for hard-core fans of the author and perhaps medical historians looking for an objective look at medicine during the late 60's.