Robin Cook's Host

Hospitals are meant to help some people heal physically and others mentally. In the novel One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey published in 1962, readers are introduced to a mental hospital that has goals that do not align with helping people. Within the hospital, characters with varied personalities and opinions are intermixed with three main characters playing specific roles with supporting characters close by. With the characters’ motivations, themes develop such as the emasculation of the men in the hospital by an oppressive nurse. Symbols, such as laughter and the “combine”, are also pertinent to themes as the readers watch the men transitioning from being oppressed to being able to stand up for themselves causing change in hospital policy.

Dr. Vincent Lam is a profound Canadian physician and writer. Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures is his award winning novel that speaks on the reality of what it’s actually like to be in medical school aiming to be apart of a medical profession and the difficult expectations students must face while still managing to stay sane during those challenging years of their lives. It’s a collection of short stories partly based off of his experiences in the medical field, following the lives of fictional characters Ming, Fitzgerald, Chen, and Sri as they endure medical school and later work as doctors. Dr. Lam does a remarkable job at incorporating unique and compelling characters with intriguing storylines who face common and extraordinary moral dilemmas that seem to shape their overall characters. Lam introduces themes of love, fear, tradition, drugs, death, self doubt, duality, etc.

In the next stanza, the poet describes “A figure walking towards cloaked in blue/ Beeping/ Tubes/ Needles.” The poem addresses the routinely and monotonous aspect of being in the hospital for long periods of time. It is a critique of the biomedical model and how the hospital system is created where patients are tended to by multiple doctors, nurses, and allied health professionals. The patients and healthcare professionals are unable to form a relationship that consists of what Kleinman describes as “empathetic witnessing” (Kleinman). Therefore, detachment between patient and health workers is developed and established, to which the patient cannot recognize or know the people assisting them. In addition, Grealy discusses this in her earliest accounts and appointments with doctors. She states that there is a layer of “condescension” and is an “endemic in the medical

The author constantly used short stories and visual description to get her thought across, entertain, and inform the reader. She told not only stories about medical findings but also about how the medical field works in general. One of the stories that stood out the most was the one about the socratic lectures that senior doctors would have with doctors-in-training to help them get a better understanding of treating real patients. She compared it to how medical school is now, filled with lectures and powerpoints of past patients, whereas back fifty years ago they had a more hands on experience. She wrote it in a way that was funny, comparing how “back in the day” you could actually look at a patient’s illness and now you have to see a slideshow of pictures and use that information to diagnose them, along with medical

Prominently featured in the mission statements of virtually of every medical school and medical institution in the world is the call for empathetic doctors. These institutions wish to train medical professionals that possess qualities of sympathy and compassion, and hospitals wish to employ health professionals that showcase similar qualities. The reality, however, is starkly different, as physicians, jaded by what they have seen in the medical world, lose the qualities that drove them to medicine in the first place. In Frank Huyler’s “The Blood of Strangers,” a collection of short stories from his time as a physician in the emergency room, Huyler uses the literary techniques of irony and imagery to depict the reality of the world of a medical professional. While Huyler provides several examples of both techniques in his accounts, moments from “A Difference of Opinion” and “The Secret” in particular stand out. Huyler uses irony and imagery in these two pieces to describe how medical professionals have lost their sense of compassion and empathy due to being jaded and desensitized by the awful incidents they have witnessed during their careers.

When watching the characters prance across the screen, one of the first things that strikes the viewer is how childlike the patients are. Their squabbles, presided over and regulated by the mother-like figure of Nurse Ratched, are quite similar to those that occur between siblings everyday. Their fixation on trivial occurrences and objects betray an infatuation with discovery concerning their environment. In this film universe, each patient is represented the same way, a far cry from their portrayal as slightly strange individuals whose conditions render them unique as seen in the

I thought that the characters were very involved and interesting, they made me want to keep reading for example in the text when Earl and Greg talk on the phone it’s funny. The plot wasn’t as interesting and it was pretty confusing, like the text kept changing. There were many themes in this book and they all stood out. The story through Greg’s point of view was fine until he was explaining stuff, I got confused when

Many doctors are unable to face their own mortality. 2. In the beginning of the book, she notes to the reader that besides a few subjects and family members, she has changed the names and identifying details of her patients in order to maintain confidentiality. She does this because

The patients take advantage of their situation in ways that they never thought possible before. What is so significant is that the ward has been trying so hard to keep the patients as weak and feeble as possible, giving the impression that they are the lowest in the human societal network, and yet they are able to find strength and courage just by embracing their true identities.

One thing I did not enjoy about this book was the combination of French words. I understand that it is a translated novel from french, but there were some parts in which, I could not understand due to some of the symptoms were in french. All in all, the novel was quite intriguing as it caught my attention and edged me to read more. I enjoyed the integration of the progressive stories that lead to the culmination of his research. By visually allowing the reader to explore the disease I feel that it would help to audience to become more engrossed in the progression of the disease over time.

To start off, I didn’t particularly enjoy the book. I found that the protagonist, Marion, seemed to drift throughout life being acting upon, rather than acting himself, while simultaneously blaming everything that seemed to go wrong with his life on someone else. On the other hand, it’s important to realize that no one lives in a bubble; who we are and what we do is influenced by others, and we exert our own influence on the world. Nonetheless, I think this irked me because I believe part of being able a physician is owning up to who you are, and what you stand for— “wearing your slippers” as Ghosh might say (Verghese 351). I didn’t feel like Marion did that.

In the movies the only hospitals that were like this were the- the- . Mental institutions. And they only took they crazy people there, so I immediately started looking for an escape route. I couldn’t stay here, I didn’t belong here, I’m not crazy. In fact I even got an A on one of my test at Pency Prep. If I were crazy I wouldn’t- “Calm down Mr. Caulfield, your heart rate is quite high” I looked over to see this typical doctor, he had bald hair, thick rimmed circle eyeglasses, and a suit shirt and tie under his long white lab coat. “ There were two other nurses in the room, one of them was tall skinny and really resembled someone off of a movie. The other nurse was short and plump, and had on too much makeup, she reminded me of a blueberry. “why am I here, where am

The documentary The Waiting Room, is about a safety-net hospital called Highland Hospital located in Oakland, California. In the film, director Peter Nix follows patients, doctors, and staff all throughout a typical day at the hospital. Furthermore, the film displays how the staff is overworked, and how the American health care system is affecting millions of uninsured patients who try to cope with injury and disease. The film utilizes techniques from the observational mode like: long takes, crisis structure, and everyday experiences that unfold spontaneously to transmit the cruel realities of uninsured patients who go to Highland Hospital seeking hope and treatment.

I loved this book so much. There is so much action and is so much better and exciting with so much amazing detail and description. This is one of my favorite books ever. When you read it, you don’t want to put it down and it makes you feel like you are with the characters in the book and you know them so well. I recommend this book to anyone who can read at this level.

The character of this book representss a person with disorder problems, with one thing you can say very quickly: it's a great but a great pediatric surgeon. Also a very angry person, very confused, it leads you to think he can be a person with problems of addiction of drugs. One of the things how a person can be almost a crazy person and a good pediatrics its the fun, the dinversion, its like doctor house when he needs vicodin and yet he can be one of the bet minds of the world, of course when you can see the front of the book, all this its happening with a big touch of dirty and insinuation of sex.