Word: crichton
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...Crichton's drama follows five patients (surprise!) whose bodies find their way into the hospital for various reasons. Patient one is a construction worker who is rushed into the emergency ward after an accident. His heart has stopped and the medical teams try bravely to save his life, but fail. Following a dramatic account of the medical effort, Crichton offers a heavy dose of "what this all means" in the context of a changing hospital system. "What this all means" unfortunately has little to do with modern health care and has even less that is not so obvious...
...Crichton uses the example of this guy's death to illustrate modern hospital technology. Sort...
...Crichton uses the example of this man's death as opposed to the painful operations of the last century, and hospital procedure has therefore been transformed. Moving quickly along, Crichton suggests that hospitals are larger now than they were before, that they now are clean, that there is now a wide variety of drugs to use in medicine (a great improvement over 1821 when snakeskins were part of the pharmacopoeia-a substance of doubtful value, according to Crichton) and that in general medical care is now more complex...
That's the end of chapter one, and fortunately the book goes a little uphill from there. The climb is excruciatingly slow, however, as Crichton continues to belabor obvious common sense facts and describes the medical cases in technical banalities...
THERE are a few worthwhile passages. A section on hospital costs is interesting: Part of a hospital bill is reprinted showing the incredible expenses involved in health care, and Crichton adds an intelligent, if brief, comment on forms of health insurance. It's in this section, too, that Crichton takes a swing at the AMA with an attack that has been quoted by reviewers who think Crichton is a serious Harvard Medical student...