Five Patients (Mass Market Paperback)

by Michael Crichton (Author) "IN THE EARLY HOURS OF THE MORNING, THE Massachussets General Hospital was notified by Harvard University that some students, at that time occupying a university..." (more)
Key Phrases: open massage, axillary block, central supply, Logan Airport, Peter Luchesi, Ralph Orlando (more...)

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

Product Description
Michael Crichton takes a look at venerable Massachusetts General, giving firsthand accounts of five true and poignant cases which reveal the near-miraculous proficiency--and sometimes alarming inefficiency--of a major city hospital. A dramatic, behind-the-scenes tale from the author of Sphere. Reissue.

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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: 6.9 x 4.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #564,407 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

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

By A Customer

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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Don't expect ER, April 30, 2003

By	VoodooLord7 (Oklahoma, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Serious Let-Down, August 15, 1998

By	[e-mail] (Montgomery, AL) - See all my reviews

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.