As a former Hospital Corpsman with the Marine Corps, I truly enjoyed the details that Michael Crichton provided.
The main character is a Pathologist at a Boston Hospital. At the period of time the Hippocratic Oath vowed to never perform abortions.
Unfortunately one of the lead characters friend who is an Obstetrician performs them quietly and is accused of performing one of them on the Leading Physicians Daughter who dies and he is accused of murder and ends up in jail.
This doesn’t set well with his Pathology friend who decides to get the truth, hell or high water, so he becomes a Sherlock Holmes on his own to get to the bottom of what really occurred.
Love this book and hope you do too!

Great medical thriller , medicine outdated but still very entertaining

I really liked it. Fast paced, interesting and with unexpected turn at the end. Little unrealistic that one doctor can go around and does what John Berry did, and that's the only reason for my 4 stars review.

Velmi dobré, skvěle vygradované, výborná detektivka z lékařského prostředí.

Death Beware

I feel that this story was very different. The plot kept you guessing. I was surprised to find out that the author is a medical doctor.

Fan-freaking-tastic!! I am so glad this was recommended to me. I love a good medical suspense/thriller. Fast paced and easy to read!

1968. I was in college near Boston. One of my housemates, a girl I didn't know well, was pregnant. Her roommate learned that the ex-boyfriend and father, a pre-med student, was planning to perform an amateur abortion. This was 5 years before Roe v. Wade. My housemates, all urban people, were galvanized into action, calling friends and even their mothers to locate a safe abortionist. I really had nothing to contribute except hand-wringing. The girl eventually decided to have the baby, and I think it was given up for adoption as I seem to recall she was back in school during my senior year.
The following year, in summer, I found a room in an off-campus house. One of my flatmates had taken some time off from school the previous year. It turned out she had had a legal abortion at one of the best hospitals in Boston. You could get one if a panel of three doctors agreed that it was necessary for your health, and mental health counted. Unfortunately something had gone wrong, and she would now be unable to bear children. Since the abortion took place in a hospital, she didn't die.

For these reasons and a few other stories from women I've known, I was interested immediately in A CASE OF NEED when, looking it up in the library catalog, I saw the tracing "Abortion - Fiction." (I was going to read it anyway as part of my Edgar-winners project.) I brought the book home and started reading it right away. I'm going to give it a rating four stars, because the story certainly pulled me along. But for my tired old eyes, I would have finished it in one sitting.

Why not five stars -- which was evidently the consensus of the Edgar committee? One reason is that there were some definite plot holes. I can't really describe them for fear of spoilers, but since the story centers around doctors and others performing illegal abortions, I will point out that the three-doctor panel option existed at the time of the book, and is not mentioned. There are several more, which I'm sure any of you who read the book will spot.

Another reason is Hudson/Crichton's annoying practice of using medical jargon and abbreviations and then FOOTNOTING them! Yes, footnotes in a mystery thriller! I realize that this book preceded /Chicago Hope/ and /ER/, which made us all so conversant with hospital talk, but after all, it did follow /Dr. Kildare /and /Ben Casey/! I haven't read any of Crichton's other books, so I trust this was just a matter of youthful inexperience. I've read many books set in milieus unfamiliar to me, and nearly all the authors have been able to explain unfamiliar terms without resorting to footnotes. Talk about taking the reader out of the story!

The third reason I have for withholding the fifth star is the evident misogyny of the narrator/protagonist and, I fear, of the author himself. Maybe it's just me, but the way the protagonist interacts with his wife, the nurses, and the other women who come into the story suggested to me that he really didn't believe women were people. Perhaps I'm being unduly harsh and perhaps my view is skewed by having read that Crichton has been married 5 times. I will accept correction if someone believes differently. The character of the narrator is problematic in some other ways as well, again, I can't really explain that without spoilers.

To be fair, I'm still impressed that Crichton wrote a book this good while studying at Harvard Medical School. In spite of some very dated attitudes, it's still worth reading.

A good airplane read. Fast paced and well written. Interesting in a historic way in terms of the way abortion is discussed.

A very fast paced medical thriller. Till the end I was sure of it being a 5 starrer or at least 4. The end well, besides being disappointing did not really sync with the rest of the story.

Dr Lee is accused of the death of a seventeen year old girl after an illegal abortion. She happens to be the daughter of a famous and arrogant cardiothoracic surgeon. So things are on the move and Dr John the narrator a friend of Dr Lee and a pathologist at the same hospital takes it up. There are many twists and turns enough to make the journey exciting... Very suited to the readathon theme Medical. Thanks Girish for the recommendation.

Aside from the "The Pirate", this is the worst novel I've ever read. I don't know how it got published. However Crichton went on to do some great work,. So the positive here is that struggling writers should find a ray of hope: if this can get published, and this writer could and did improve vastly, so can they.

The name Michael Crichton always brings mixed responses to my mind. He was a brilliant medical student who received his MD from Harvard Medical School. I loved a few of his novels like The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park and Congo, while I hated some of his books like the State of Fear. His opinion about global warming in that book was so acrimonious that he got severe backlash from people from all walks of life from almost all corners of the world. This medical thriller is one of his earliest novels that he wrote under the pseudonym Jeffrey Hudson (a dwarf who lived in the court of England in the 17th century).

n  What I learned from this book n
n  1) Can we say that the past is the past? n
The author tells us how most of us are linked to the past. I have a slightly different opinion here, though. I truly believe that the past is the past. We should never repent too much over lost things and opportunities. The only thing we should be careful about is that the ghosts of the past shouldn't haunt our present or future.

"We are all tied to the past, individually and collectively. The past shows through in the very structure of our bones, the distribution of our hair, and the coloring of our skin, as well as the way we walk, stand, eat, dress—and think."

n  2) Boston n
The author says that Boston has the best prison cells in the USA. Boston is mentioned to have one of the worst traffic in America. Boston has the best hospitals in the USA. The author says that almost every parent in Boston at that time wished their children to study either Medicine or Law.

"Actually, Boston has some of the nicest cells in America. They have to: lots of famous people have spent time in those cells. Mayors, public officials, people like that. You can't expect a man to run a decent campaign for reelection if he's in a lousy cell, can you?"

n  3) Rebellious children and their parents n
The relation between rebellious children and their parents is one important topic discussed in this book

"A rebellious child chooses the weak point of its parent with unfailing uncanny accuracy and precedes to exploit it. When the punishment comes, it must be in terms of the same weak point. It must all fit together. If someone asks you a question in French, you must answer in french. ”

n  My favourite three lines from this book n

“Once you gulp carbon down, either as cigarette smoke or city dirt, your body never gets rid of it. It just stays in your lungs.”

"Morality must keep up with technology because if a person is faced with the choice of being moral and dead or immoral and alive, they'll choose life every time."

“Most doctors when they receive a call from other doctors follow a ritual pattern. first, they ask how you are, then how your work is, then how your family is."

n  What could have been better?n
This book was published in 1968. But it is still difficult to agree with many problems in this book even after considering the time-period. The way the novel started by calling all the heart surgeons bast**** was ludicrous. The manner in which the author mentions the differences between the clinicians and the researchers makes it more problematic. To make matters worse, one character was calling women as creatures and patients as dirty unscientific things.

I am a person who believes that Nurses deserve equal recognition like doctors in our hospitals. The ascendancy shown by doctors in this book is preposterous. The Nurses are treated like sex toys by the doctors. It seems like infidelity is the standard norm in the doctor's family life. Racism is also seen in a high amount in this book. We can see the N-word told by a couple of characters in this book. African Americans are referred to as black meat. Asian doctors are referred to as gadget-oriented orientals. The fact that it is written by a doctor makes the situation even worse. There are indeed doctors with lousy personality traits, just like people in every profession. But that doesn't give the author the liberty to extrapolate that behavior to every doctor and generalize that behavior. Mr.Crichton knew the ramifications of the absurd stuff he was writing, which might be one of the reasons why he was forced to write this novel under a pseudonym

The writing style and plot of this book are actually good. But all the problems mentioned above robbed away the entertainment factor altogether from it and made it a painful read. We can argue that this is a work of fiction and the author had the freedom to write whatever he wanted. But I still felt it was too much for an ordinary reader like me to digest.

n  Rating n
2/5 The plot and the authors writing skills will give you an interesting read. But everything else about this book was a big let down.

A pathologist goes all out to defend his friend, Dr. Lee, who is charged with murder. Not only does he put his own career in danger but also his life. Jeffery Hudson is Michael Crichton and this is Michael's first book. Read the story but remember it's from 1969 so things have changed since then, but still a great story.