Despite the age the information, many of the central concepts about the hospital, physicians, and medical care still hold true. It certainly opened my eyes a bit more to how much development has occurred in medicine in the last 40 years. However, it also showed how certain dreams of the future of medicine have been impeded by money, politics, and medical tradition. Overall, it is a great book to understand medical history. Just try to put yourself in that time period (teletypes, paper medical records, room-sized computers, etc).

Interesting. I expected it to focus more on the patients, but I enjoyed how the patients were used to explain various aspects of hospitalization.

My mom read his books back in high school/college and recommended them to me. They’re really insightful into medicine, delivery of care, the history of hospital systems and cover five patient cases along the way. Perfect if you love the art and science of medicine.

This was an interesting look into some medical history but I much prefer his fiction pieces..

This book was a let down from the very beginning. While the information on the back likes to have the reader believe that the book focuses on five patients, hence the title, it really only uses the five patients to explain how hospitals work. The patients each get about five pages to describe what was happening to them, and then the book moves on. It's not that I am upset about the set up of this book, it's just that it was falsely advertised, which is what annoyed me.

Overall it's a pretty good book, if you're interested in the medical field. As other people mentioned it isn't a novel but past experiences from the author. If anyone is interested in a career in medicine I'd highly reccomend this book as you'll learn everything from the history of medicine, to surgical operations.

this book did not meet my expectations. I thought it would be like one of his novels. I was wrong. This is basically a history of hospitals and patient care. I have to admit I skimmed through parts of this book.

I work in the healthcare field and I thought that I was getting a fiction book my Michael Crichton. Imagine my surprise when I realized that I had a nonfiction and interesting read. The funny part is that I had no clue that this author actually created the TV series ER. The story encompasses five patients, a construction worker in his fifties who is seriously injured in the collapse of a scaffold, a middle-aged railroad dispatcher who develops a high fever that makes him wildly delirious, a young worker that nearly severs his hand from his arm in an accident, a woman who while traveling alone develops persistent chest pain and is treated by a doctor on a TV screen and a mother of three who is diagnosed with a life-threatening disease. Five Patients has abundant detail, decent medical knowledge and insight into the health care business all told in layman’s terms.
4 Stars

The story is about five patients but that is just a small part of the book. The majority of the book talks about the history of medicine and the role of a hospital in society. An interesting read, maybe a little bit too much medical jargon, but you're able to understand the context of it.

What an odd book! It's stated as a medical thriller and the basis for the TV series ER, however it was actually an insight into the Massachusetts General Hospital, full of heavy medical jargon and facts and figure for American medical history.

Each chapter starts with an emergency senario, but then desolves into what is right or wrong about medical practices in the US, or how things should or shouldn't be dealt with.

Interesting, but not a thriller by any stretch of the imagination, and little to do with ER. In fact not really a story at all!

This book was an interesting one because it’s Crichton writing about medicine and sharing some of the things that he learned from working at a hospital. As well as being the guy behind Jurassic Park, Crichton also created ER, and this book shows that he knew what he was talking about when he did that.

True, the book was written in the late sixties and so medicine has changed quite a lot since then, but then there are also a surprising number of places in which it hasn’t really changed at all. Given that I’ve worked with a client on a book about the future of healthcare, it was interesting to take a look back at the past, as well as at what Crichton thought the future was likely to look like way back then.

A lot of the technologies and the ideas that he talks about are still very much hot topics today. For example, he covered some early examples of telemedicine, which is essentially when a doctor and a patient communicate via video chat. Back at the end of the 60s, the technology was super limited and the consultations were in black and white, but I was fascinated by the fact that they were happening at all.

The title comes from the core concept, which is that Crichton follows the stories of five different patients. Fascinating.

I recently had a discussion with a friend about what sorts of books I like to read given my interest in history. I made the distinction between books that are history and those that are more topical. I generally don't read the latest book about the hot topic of the day. I feel that this sort of book gets stale fairly quickly. That is, they may seem interesting today, but if you go back later, they may be proved to have missed the mark.

Five Patients fits in the "topical" category. The title is a bit misleading - the five patients discussed make up perhaps only twenty pages of text or less than a tenth of the reading. These patients are used as a way to introduce deeper, more general topics covering the history of medical care (anesthesia, anti-sepsis), the organization of teaching hospitals, advances in computer technology (telehealth, of all things, in 1969), and so on.

Crichton tells us how hospitals (and healthcare in general) have changed in the half-century prior to the book being published. Part of that is down to advances in medical knowledge and technology and part is down to how hospitals earn revenue (i.e. the rise of health insurance). In the Afterword, he makes some predictions on how hospitals might change in the next decade. In general, technological change has driven increasingly rapid change in society. I don't think hospitals changed as much as Crichton predicted, but the future is hard to predict, so I don't count this against him.

When it comes to disease and/or treatment, he doesn't get deep into specifics, which is good. He describes some diseases/conditions and those descriptions are still valid today, whereas the therapy would be totally outdated now. Had he spent more time talking about how these five patients were cured (or not), I think the book would be less valuable reading today.

If you're interested in the history of healthcare or hospitals, or curious about the technology of half a century ago, this book might be worth reading.