Customer Reviews

Five Patients

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I thought that the book was rather dry and pointless; I did not actually finish the book because I was so bored with it. Perhaps if I had completed it, I could have found it more enjoyable. But alas, my decision stands

I've read almost all of Crichton's books, but this one is my least favorite. I don't even remember if I finished it or not (that's how boring it was).

I was very disappointed in this book after reading some of Michael Crichton's books. This is, of course, a very different type of book, but it was very drab. I'm really interested in medicine, but the book was way over my head when it came to the terminology. It has also been about 20 years since it was written so a lot has changed in the profession. I couldn't even get through the book. Perhaps someone in the medical profession would find it a little more exciting.

I was somehow misled by the title. I thought I was going to read five short stories of how doctor can treat (miraculously) five difficult patients, those I would read in Reader's Digest. But no, indeed I was surpised that those five patients are only mentioned in 1/5 of the book. The rest 4/5 of the book are talking about everything about hospital - its history, budget, organizational structure, politics, teaching versus community hospital, surgeon, urine, anaesthesia.....

I find most of these medical topics are interesting, though some are somewhat outdated. Also, I admire Mr. Crichton's writing skill to interweave these different topics together in a 200-page book.

My recommedation - do not treat it as a fiction. It is not that a waste of time (onlyl 200 pages!!)

I expected this to be more of a "medical thriller," something like ER in a book. But it wasn't anything like that. It's an analysis of hospitals written over 30 years ago. Some parts of the book are informative, but even though Crichton doesn't use a lot of fancy medical jargon, I think people in the medical profession would get far more out of this book than the average lay person. I've read many of Crichton's other books, but this one isn't anything like his others, so don't expect a thrilling page-turner if you read this book.

This book does an excellent job of painlessly teaching us about the history and techniques of medicine in the context of following five patients through their hospital stays.
This book is medically out-of-date, since it is based on Crichton's OWN experiences as a medical student. I understand Crichton has taken a hiatus from his medical career to pursue a career in writing.

This book is not primarily about what it's title suggests it is. Each chapter describing an individual case gives much larger space to historical medical background than to the case itself.. This medical information about the history of the Hospital and the history of Medicine, along with the for - the - time up-to- date description of medical practice is what makes this book so interesting. Only one case history was especially interesting. This was the first which describes how a patient was saved by modern medical means even though the doctors throughout never really understood the nature of the disease and were not responsible for the final cure.
Crichton writes in a very clear way, and truly knows his stuff. He also wisely emphasizes the idea of a Hospital as a work in process. He would be the least surprised at knowing how much has changed in the forty years since the initial introduction of this book.
So while this book does not have the kind of dramatic power that case- history works of Barton LeRouche and in another way Oliver Sacks have, it is a very informative and insightful read.