A Case of Need
by Michael Crichton
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael CrichtonEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-08-05
ISBN: 0451210638
Number of pages: 416
Publisher: Signet
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780451210630
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of A Case of Need
Book Review: An unintentional but revealing "portrait of the author as a young man"
Summary: 5 Stars
Dr. John Berry is a pathologist who's been covering for a colleague's policy of occasionally providing abortions. The colleague, Dr. Arthur Lee, truly believes that failure to provide medical care - in the form of a safe hospital procedure - constitutes malpractice, morally speaking. He bases this belief on the number of women who, when refused such a procedure, end their pregnancies anyway by methods far more dangerous.
Now Art Lee is in jail, charged with an abortion that John Berry believes he didn't perform. The patient, daughter of a prominent Boston surgeon, died. According to her family, Karen Randall was a saintly young woman who's been foully murdered. According to Karen's friends and other associates, though, she was anything else but saintly. The same thing goes for her outraged father, and for most of the other people Dr. Berry winds up investigating as he desperately searches for the truth about Karen's death. Who actually did perform the abortion that killed her? That's the only information sure to free Dr. Lee before his case comes to trial, and a trial all by itself - even if it ends in acquittal - will kill his career, in this medical and social world of the late 1960s.
Michael Crichton's first novel, originally published under a pseudonym, is an amazing piece of work for so young a writer (he was 26). It's an intriguing detective story entwined with a stinging commentary on social hypocrisy and medical ethics, that 40 years later had the power to put me back in the world of my own adolescence. A world where unwed motherhood automatically branded the woman as at worst immoral, at best grossly immature; and where the laws of most U.S. states made termination of pregnancy in a hospital all but impossible, except when physicians like the fictional Art Lee and John Berry falsified the patient's diagnosis to provide a D&C for apparent "medical necessity."
Brrr. That world's memory scares me all by itself. The surprising thing about this book, though, isn't its "message" (it ought to be required reading for any woman who's grown up knowing she had control of her reproductive capacity from menarche onward). It's the look backward into the time and place that shaped this successful author, and then realizing - if you've read as many of his books as I have - how hard it was for him to let this world go, in creating the characters and plots for his later works.
Summary of A Case of Need
A Case of Need is Michael Crichton's award-winning debut novel, written shortly after he completed his medical internship. Set against the ever-building pressure and pace of a large Boston medical center, the tensions flare-and explode-when a surgical operation tragically ends in death, raising countless questions. Was it accidental malpractice? A violation of the Hippocratic oath? Or cold-blooded murder?Genre Fiction Books
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