A Case of Need | Michael Crichton | Misery begets misery

A Case of Need | Michael Crichton | An unintentional but revealing "portrait of the author as a young man"

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A Case of Need

	A Case of Need Michael Crichton Signet, 2003 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 102 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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?

Misery begets misery

I rarely read true stories, but after this one, Crichton has redeemed himself. It's interesting, informative and breathtaking. I love it!!!
(^u^)

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An unintentional but revealing "portrait of the author as a young man"

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.

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A Stimulating Story that kept my interest

A Case of Need is a stimulating story that kept my interest and I found that it was hard to put down. It educated s on some of the arguments for both sides of the abortion issue while maintaining a very good story line and character set. The plot revolves around who performed an illegal abortion on a girl from an affluent family.
As you read on you that the abortion killed the girl, so the person who performed the abortion is guilty of murder. For medical thriller fans I would highly recommend this book.

A Case of Need

I've been a big fan of Michael Crichton ever since I read The Andromeda Strain. Not only is his writing style suspenseful and interesting, but his attention to detail regarding the subject matter can be a learning experience. A Case of Need will certainly give you pause regarding the medical field and the lengths that some doctors would probably go to in order to cover their backsides. Once you are into a Crichton novel it's almost impossible to put down until you are finished.

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