COMA

by Robin Cook ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 26, 1977

Dr. Cook is the best thing to happen to the medical novel since Michael Crichton. He wrote his own The Year of the Intern in 1972, and now here's Coma: exciting entertainment--with no amphitheatrical nonsense--dealing with a medical malpractice which hasn't happened yet in the real world, but could. Susan Wheeler, who has completed two years of medical school at Boston Memorial Hospital, is one of the select students recruited for duty on the surgical floor under Mark Bellows, a professor-surgeon who sees all kinds of possibilities in her. The first unexplained error is a young girl who has a D & C and lapses into a coma from which she never emerges; ditto another minor surgery victim, and Susan, unwilling to dismiss the matter as an ""idiosyncratic reaction,"" cause unknown, ignores her page and heads for the library, where she turns up the fact that there has been a higher incidence of this kind of coma at Boston Memorial than elsewhere. From then on, although told to mind her business by Mark and her superiors, she continues her ""phantomizing"" and speculation: the possibility of carefully bled-in carbon monoxide during the anesthesia. A locker full of drugs turns up, and finally Susan finds the not-so-living proof of coma for profit--in an institute that's a clearing house for blackmarket organs. Cook is an attractive writer, and his story, pulse points above anything you might have seen or read, has no remission.

Pub Date: April 26, 1977

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1977

Categories: FICTION