Mybrary.info
mybrary.info » Книги » Детективы и триллеры » Триллеры » Five Patients - Crichton Michael (книга регистрации .TXT) 📗

Five Patients - Crichton Michael (книга регистрации .TXT) 📗

Тут можно читать бесплатно Five Patients - Crichton Michael (книга регистрации .TXT) 📗. Жанр: Триллеры. Так же Вы можете читать полную версию (весь текст) онлайн без регистрации и SMS на сайте mybrary.info (MYBRARY) или прочесть краткое содержание, предисловие (аннотацию), описание и ознакомиться с отзывами (комментариями) о произведении.
Перейти на страницу:

Foreword

there has recently been a lot of fool-ish talk about something called "the new medicine." To the extent that it implies a distinction from some form of old medicine, the phrase has no meaning at all. Medicine has crossed no watershed; there has been no triumphant breakthrough, no quantum jump in science or technology or social application.

Yet there is, within medicine itself, a sense that things are different. It is difficult to define, for it is not the consequence of change, but rather the fact of change itself.

The first time I began to look at the Massachusetts General Hospital in the spring of 1969 I had the uneasy feeling there was too much flux, too much instability in the system. I felt a little like an interviewer who has come upon his subject at a bad time. Only later did I realize that there would never be a "good" time, and that change is a constant feature of the hospital environment. The true figurehead of modern medicine is not Hippocrates but Heraclitus.

To trace a history of change, one must go back about fifty years, to the time when organized research began to produce major new scientific and technological advances. Medicine has been revolutionized by those advances, but they have not stopped. Indeed, the pace of change has increased. Within the past ten years, social pressures have been added to those of science and technology, producing a demand for a new concept of medical care, a new ethic of responsibility for the doctor, and a new structuring of institutions to deliver broader and better care.

As a result, medicine has become not a changed profession but a perpetually changing one. There is no longer a sense that one can make a few adjustments and then return to a steady state, for the system will never be stable again. There is nothing permanent except change itself.

From this standpoint, the experiences of five patients in a university teaching hospital are most interesting. It should be stated at once that there is nothing typical about either the patients described here or the hospital in which they were treated. Rather, they are presented because their experiences are indicative of some of the ways medicine is now changing.

These five patients were selected from a larger group of twenty-three, all admitted during the first seven months of 1969. In talking to these patients and their families, I identified myself as a fourth-year medical student writing a book about the hospital. As they are presented here, each patient's name and other identifying characteristics have been changed.

I chose these five from the larger group because I thought their experiences were in some way particularly interesting or relevant. Accordingly, this is a highly selective and personal book, based on the idiosyncratic observation of one medical student wandering around a large institution, sticking his nose into this room or that, talking to some people and watching others and trying to decide what, if anything, it all means.

M.C.

La Jolla, California

November 15, 1969

Перейти на страницу:

Crichton Michael читать все книги автора по порядку

Crichton Michael - все книги автора в одном месте читать по порядку полные версии на сайте онлайн библиотеки mybrary.info.


Five Patients отзывы

Отзывы читателей о книге Five Patients, автор: Crichton Michael. Читайте комментарии и мнения людей о произведении.


Уважаемые читатели и просто посетители нашей библиотеки! Просим Вас придерживаться определенных правил при комментировании литературных произведений.

  • 1. Просьба отказаться от дискриминационных высказываний. Мы защищаем право наших читателей свободно выражать свою точку зрения. Вместе с тем мы не терпим агрессии. На сайте запрещено оставлять комментарий, который содержит унизительные высказывания или призывы к насилию по отношению к отдельным лицам или группам людей на основании их расы, этнического происхождения, вероисповедания, недееспособности, пола, возраста, статуса ветерана, касты или сексуальной ориентации.
  • 2. Просьба отказаться от оскорблений, угроз и запугиваний.
  • 3. Просьба отказаться от нецензурной лексики.
  • 4. Просьба вести себя максимально корректно как по отношению к авторам, так и по отношению к другим читателям и их комментариям.

Надеемся на Ваше понимание и благоразумие. С уважением, администратор mybrary.info.


Прокомментировать
Подтвердите что вы не робот:*