Informed Consent

A book which was written before ER, more than ten years ago, which seems very current in its unpretentious voice and its fast pace. It's a little like a precursor to ER, but it's set in a research hospital, and it follows a doctor in the last phase of his training as he struggles with the demands of producing new knowledge and the difficulties of extracting this knowledge from the suffering of real, individual, often very likeable patients. There is a detective story aspect to the central "case" in the book, and if the hero/doc doesn't solve it correctly, the patient will die. The hero makes mistakes, goes down blind alleys, but his relentlessness eventually brings him to the answers his patient often resists. There's a lot mixed in here: implied problems in medical ethics, the hunt for deep, explosive killer diagnosis, the politics of university hospitals and research grants. In the end, it comes down to finding the answer in a single patient, and what it means for him and for his family