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...hospital mismanagement, AMA intransigence, and technological innovations in medicine, isn't it? Actually, author-doctor Michael Crichton has performed no mysterious feat- Patients is just as conversational and dramatic as his other novels; it is written for the ignorant layman and contains just enough intelligent information to fool the reader into thinking that the compelling mystery he is reading is a technical account of hospital life...
Crichton even occasionally attempts to discuss the serious aspects of the health care revolution, but consistently keeps his arguments superficial; Patients must be excused as pure entertainment. Medicine holds a certain mystique for many readers, and fictional suspense can be fun; Crichton has thrown together some fictional medicine and a lot of dramatic suspense, added just enough facts to prove that he once was a med student, and come up with Patients, a book that offers the casual fiction reader a quasi-intellectual form of entertainment...
Crichton, now living in La Jolla, California, has abandoned a medical career and is writing full-time. Before reading Patients, the reader should take the hint. Crichton is his own best critic...
...languid bodies frozen in glossy color, their fingers fading off into wisps of smoke. And you remember Life, the magazine which did for dope what the New York Times did for Charles Reich. But perhaps you weren't satisfied by Life. Or Look. Or Time or Newsweek or the Reader's Digest. Perhaps you want more...
...scenes are better than pop and appear to be building toward a chilling foreview of post-modern society. So much that Vandenberg's therapist-interrogator says is plainly reasonable; the Soviets, by his plausible account, really are providing the greatest good for the greatest number. Very briefly, the reader is reminded of the coldly logical dialogues in Darkness at Noon between the old Bolshevik Rubashov and his inquisitor, Gletkin. But little in Vandenberg's sulky response is heroic, or even intelligent. In effect, he simply shrugs. He is not interested in the greatest number. All he wants...