Five Patients

Five Patients is a non-fiction book by Michael Crichton that recounts his experiences of hospital practices in the late 1960s at Massachusetts General Hospital in the USA.

The book follows each of five patients through their hospital experience and the context of their treatment, showing how it fell below today's standards. The author notes in the foreword of the 1994 reprint of this book that medical practices (both the culture, technology and finances) have changed significantly since the book was written, but that the text was left as is to give us a more complete glimpse into the past.

The five patients in question were Ralph Orlando, a construction worker seriously injured in a scaffold collapse, John O'Connor, a middle aged dispatcher suffering from fever that has reduced him to a delirious wreck, Peter Luchesi, a young man who severs his hand in an accident, Sylvia Thompson, an airline passenger who suffers chest pains, and Edith Murphy, a mother of three who is diagnosed with a life threatening disease.

Crichton goes into a brief history of medicine up to 1969 to help place hospital culture and practice into context, and touches on the issues of national healthcare, drug prices, healthcare costs, and healthcare politics. The rising cost of healthcare is a central theme - then at 15% per year.

He quotes Dr. James Howard Means, who is critical of the American Medical Association: "every attempt has been made by liberally-minded groups to improve medical care and make it more accessible...the AMA has attacked with ever increasing truculence... They forget perhaps that medicine is for the people, not for the doctors. They need some enlightenment on this point."