M.D.

by Neil Ravin

This is a novel about what they do to each other and to their patients. And what their patients do to them. The heroes are young doctors, fresh out of medical school and taking the blame for disease and random disaster.William Ryan. Possessor of a brand new M.D. and defender of some old and precious illusions. Handsome and charming, a brilliant academic and athlete. Soon after arriving at The Tower, New York's most prestigious teaching hospital, Ryan embarks on three separate emotional relationships with a beautiful Eurasian nurse, a young patient dying of Hodgkin's, and Diana Hayes, an ambitious and calculating female cardiologist.While juggling his personal life, he also gets on the bad side of the bureaucratic arm of the hospital, which threatens to end his career before it's even begun.

Genres: Fiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

Reviews

[Kristin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like I've read either another of this author's books featuring these characters, or another author's book with a similar plot and similarly named characters, because there was a familiarity in the beginning, but as the book progressed, I knew I had not read this one before. Ravin chronicles the first 2 years of his main character, William Ryan's, medical training at a hospital in Manhattan. The book was written in the early 1980s, and probably was contemporary at the time, but other than the structure of the training program and use of cigarettes in the hospital, felt like it could have been set today. The book felt like a soap opera, with Ryan chasing after a senior doctor who is married but stops by his apartment for a quick lovemaking session, falling for a young cancer patient he met while on rotation to the depressing Whipple hospital, and taking 'special showers' with a nurse whose feelings for him mirror his feelings for the senior doctor.
Not all of the writing was straight out of a romance novel. In fact, the best subplot was either ahead of its time or solidified that Ravin was writing about the issues of modern medicine. Ryan diagnoses one of his patients with an unusual illness, impressing Dr. Bloomburg, one of the senior doctors at the hospital, who then takes Ryan under his wing and together they investigate this disease further. It turns out this disease is present almost exclusively in homosexual male patients. Although it's not called HIV or AIDS in the book, I couldn't help but wonder if Ravin was seeing the early days of HIV in his real-life patients and thinking it would make an interesting plot in his next book.
Overall though, I found the book largely un-memorable, as there were no major highs and lows or cliffhangers in the plot. It ends at the end of Ryan's first residency year, and cleanly so, such that Ravin could write another book featuring Ryan and some of the other minor characters, but that if he chose not to, readers wouldn't feel that he left them hanging. Perhaps this is why the characters seemed familiar, that one of Ravin's other books was a sequel, but didn't allude to this one enough to link them in my memory.

[Barry Ziman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Neil Ravin is my cousin. This chilling book that vividly described cancer gave me nightmares as a young reader. It also chronicles the eruption of HIV cancer before science understood the etiology of the disease.

[LoveAGoodBook · Rating 3 out of 5]

S+L+ didn’t finish

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mostly interesting for a couple anecdotal medical tales, and also some things on how medicine was 30 years ago - the interns and residents did the AM blood draws! - but mostly kind of trashy. Starts off with a cornball ripoff of "The Stranger," and stars a Strong Iconoclastic Young Doctor Man who makes every lady's heart go aflutter. Into bed. Definitely not the best book.

[Kendra]

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