Basic White

By R.Z. Sheppard

HOSPITAL: THE HIDDEN LIVES OF A MEDICAL CENTER STAFF by Michael Medved

Simon & Schuster; 319 pages; $14.95

St. Elsewhere, M*A*S*H, General Hospital: need one list all the books, movies and TV shows that turn medicine into melodrama? Yet this Hospital is different. The Hidden Lives of a Medical Center Staff skillfully assembles interviews with 28 men and women at Memorial Medical Center, the fictitious name used to disguise a major teaching hospital in the San Francisco area. Michael Medved (What Really Happened to the Class of '65) has induced Memorial's physicians, nurses, technicians and even the janitor to unload about their jobs, themselves and each other. He has given them pseudonyms and heavily edited their contributions to produce a compelling pace and tone.

As a result, Hospital reads sometimes like 28 characters in search of a plot and sometimes like one collective voice talking to a psychotherapist. Details of depression, marital misery and frustration abound. Medved cites studies indicating that the rate of drug addiction among American physicians is 30 to 100 times that of the general population; 47% of responding doctors reported that their marriages were unsatisfactory, and 13% of male M.D.s said they had sex with patients.

Even so, sex is not what they really care about. The main preoccupation is with death, from the most traditional internist to a Montana-raised ex-Marine who has become an Orthodox Jewish male nurse. To Jack Buckman, director of emergency medicine, death is an opponent that must be beaten every time: "If it ever happens that somebody comes into the emergency department alive and awake and 15 minutes later he's dead, the physician taking care of him better have a goddam good reason why it happened."

Cancer specialists cannot afford such bravado. Most of their patients do not recover. "When you see as many people as I do," says Arnold Brody, "you collect quite a stable of sick friends. Then they start knocking off. It's like losing a friend every month . . . Year after year after year."

Medved's people are fiercely assertive about their individualities. Yet, surprisingly, many hold the layman's stereotypes about the medical profession: surgeons are coldhearted, cardiologists are technophiles, psychiatrists are intellectuals, and young nurses are lusty. They are also quick to see their own worst traits in colleagues: selfishness, excessive competitiveness and arrogance. This is particularly true when the doctors were formerly husband and wife.

In another sense, these men and women in white are indissolubly wed to each other and to the reader. It is not hard to see why. Most people begin and end in a hospital. They are born and give birth there, and they will probably die there, intubated and twilighted by drugs. The patient is always a kind of prisoner, arrested by accident or manacled to his genetic linkage. But as Medved's thorough probings indicate, the doctors, nurses and attendants are not wardens. They are far more authoritative: they are descendants of an ancient caste of magician-priests who, despite exposes and malpractice suits, still exert a vital influence on our bodies, to say nothing of our imaginations.

--By R.Z. Sheppard This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.