Five Patients [Mass Market Paperback]

Michael Crichton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 13, 1989

"Crichton has an extraordinary capacity to seize upon, then make real and personal, the new and the complex, the intriguing and the frighening."
THE NATION
In this incisive, detailed survey of five patients, famous thriller author and doctor Michael Crichton explores the dramatic workings of Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston's oldest and most prestigious.
This readable account covers not only the history of the hospital's place in society, but also the actual minute-to-minute functions of Mass General, where health professionals wage their daily battle against disease and death. Crichton's insightful look at the changes in medicine and surgery caused by technological strides of recent years makes for amazing reading.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Michael Crichton, creator of many a blockbuster, began his writing career while still a student at Harvard Medical School. Though he never practiced medicine, the education was enough to put a gloss of verisimilitude on works like The Andromeda Strain and the long-running television hit ER. Five Patients is ER in real life--circa 1969, when Crichton graduated from medical school. Five different patients are examined at Massachusetts General Hospital; each patient's story illustrates some larger aspect of the hospital system. Thus, Ralph Orlando's death from cardiac arrest engenders a brief history of the modern hospital and emergency ward. John O'Connor, who has an unexplained high fever and infection, spends a month in the hospital, leading to a discourse on the cost of medical care (perhaps the most eye-opening chapter of the book--or the most unintentionally funny one from a 1999 perspective). The saga of Peter Luchesi, a worker whose hand is nearly severed in an industrial accident, leads to a discussion of 20th-century surgical advances. Sylvia Thompson, a traveler with chest pains who is seen by a doctor via closed-circuit TV at an airport, benefits from new (at the time) diagnostic and therapeutic technologies that have altered irrevocably the doctor's role. Finally, the case of Edith Murphy, diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus, serves quite literally to educate the medical students and interns who take on much of her care, as the hospital staff hierarchy is dissected and explained. Crichton's style here tends to the sober and bureaucratic--reading it is much more like brain surgery than hanging out in the staff room with George Clooney and Noah Wyle--but for the industrious it's a fascinating glimpse of pre-HMO medicine. --Barrie Trinkle

Review

"Crichton writes superbly".

-- Chicago Tribune --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (January 13, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345354648
• ISBN-13: 978-0345354648
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #902,066 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Michael Crichton was born in Chicago in 1942. His novels include Next, State of Fear, Prey, Timeline, Jurassic Park, and The Andromeda Strain. He was also the creator of the television series ER. One of the most popular writers in the world, his books have been made into thirteen films, and translated in thirty-six languages. He died in 2008.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Solid Informational Novel, July 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Five Patients (Mass Market Paperback)

I am an enourmous fan of the TV show ER. Everyone knows that Michael Crichton created ER so when i finally found a copy of Five Patients, (the book is extremly hard to find), I quickly grabbed it off the shelf and bought it. I thought that it would be like reading an episode of ER. Boy was a wrong, but wrong in a good way. For each patient Crichton takes up between 45-60 pages. Only 10-12 of those pages are about the patient themself. The rest is information, not on medicine, but how the hospital has changed throughout the years. From surgery to cost to medicine itself. I enjoyed the information tremendously. And as anyone who reads my reviews knows, sometimes I'm not a big fan of an entire novel being informational.(Congo) But Five Patients is different. It taught me stuff about the hospital I didn't know, and added on to the stuff I already knew. However by the final patient, Edith Murphy, the information was something I already knew so that took a little away. But only a little. By reading this book, I can see my I enjoy ER so much. It's the best show on television in my opinion. Five Patients is true nonfiction work.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Don't expect ER, April 29, 2003

By 

Bill R. Moore (New York, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Five Patients (Mass Market Paperback)

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Five Patients. Five Stories. A Unique View of Crichton., January 16, 2007

By 

Fred Telegdy (Stuarts Draft, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Five Patients (Mass Market Paperback)

A must-read for any fan of Crichton, Five Patients will take you through the story of five patients of Massachusetts General Hospital. Written while he was still a student, the reader can glean an understanding of why Crichton writes the novels he does now. The non-fiction aspect of the book is atypical Crichton, but makes the stories that much more engaging.

Along with a deeper understanding of where Crichton comes from, the reader will also get a deeper understanding of the modern day hospital and the things that go right, and wrong, inside its walls.

This is not the Crichton you think you know, so don't buy it if you want another Jurassic Park. Instead, buy it as a window to the past to see a Michael Crichton you won't see anywhere else.