Hospital: The Hidden Lives of a Medical Center Staff

by Michael Medved

Presents a candid look at the intimate personal lives and medical careers of twenty-eight health professionals, detailing their successes, failures, problems, families, and relationships

Genres: Medicine

319 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 1982

About the author

American radio show host, author, political commentator, and film critic.

MICHAEL MEDVED’s daily three-hour radio program, The Michael Medved Show, reaches five million listeners on more than three hundred stations coast to coast.

He is the author of twelve other books, including the bestsellers The 10 Big Lies About America, Hollywood vs. America, Hospital, and What Really Happened to the Class of ’65?

He is a member of USA Today’s board of contributors, is a former chief film critic for the New York Post, and, for more than a decade, cohosted Sneak Previews, the weekly movie-review show on PBS. Medved is an honors graduate of Yale with departmental honors in American history. He lives with his family in the Seattle area.

Reviews

[Rebecca I · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was written in 1982 and it shows. It is good for seeing that there has been some progress in thinking about race, religion, sex, and politics. It was written at a time when there was overt prejudice about all of these things and women physicians and male nurses were the exception rather than the norm. It also shows there have been changes in the way we think about alcoholism, and the practice of psychiatry. There has been more power given to the patient and less unquestioned control of a patient by a doctor giving an independent decision. All this being said, there could still be this book written about a hospital in the United States and many of the emotions of the various workers in the hospital - especially a teaching hospital -would be exactly as stated in this book. Worth a read for anyone thinking of getting into the medical profession.

[Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book discusses the lives of many people within one hospital setting. Each person featured also tells their opinions about the others in the book! Get to know a variety of doctors, nurses, and other health professionals, in this book!

[Kristin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although the book is a bit dated, the intent of the author to capture the lives of hospital personnel when the coats and rubber gloves come off is accomplished. For the most part, the topic of the interviews Medved does with everyone from big-name surgeons to the tech who runs the morgue focus on love, marriage, and the stress working in a hospital places on personal relationships. I wish it instead would have focused more on the patients and how exactly each person's role fits into making the hospital a successful, functioning organization, but Medved made it clear from the beginning that wasn't his purpose for the book. I didn't find any one interview particularly interesting, by the end they all somewhat sounded the same, but did enjoy the chapters that focused on multiple anecdotes from the interview subjects on the same topic, as those topics often were work-related. His transitions from chapter to chapter seemed quite smooth, as if he asked the person being interviewed specifically about the subject of the next interview, so I'm not sure if it just worked out that way or he took a bit of creative liberty to engineer those transitions. Overall, an OK book, but it reminded me of the kind of book that would accompany a show like 'Grey's Anatomy' (but 30+ years ago) and explain which doctors and nurses have hooked up, broken up, or hate each other's guts, whereas I would have liked to know more about the medical and professional goings-on.

[Yak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating... one of the most complete and unvarnished accounts of life in a hospital, not just for doctors but all types of staff. And it's all told in transcribed oral interviews a la Studs Terkel. I'm amazed how candid he got his subjects to be about income, sex, and each other. Even though the names and other identifying info were changed, it has to be very easy for the subjects to identify each other at least.