Deadly fogs, horrible diseases, and brilliant medical detectives

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	• The Medical Detectives (Plume) Berton Roueche Plume, 1991 - 432 pages average customer review:based on 20 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Wonderful Book!

I was given this book by one of the epidemiologists that was featured in the book. He had great respect for Roueche and loves his articles. I think these stories a very well written and really hold your attention. They also give you a good history of diseases and conditions. Great book!

"House" without the snark

This "classic collection of award-winning medical investigative reporting", published in 1988, is an excellent book. Each of the 25 case studies originally appeared as an "Annals of medicine" piece in the New Yorker, and there's not a dud in the bunch.

Most of the cases happened in the 1950's or 1960's, when sophisticated, CSI-era analytical techniques were unavailable. Nonetheless, there is no sense that these stories are dated. Roueche is a natural storyteller and has the rare ability to present technical aspects in a way that is intelligible to the non-expert reader, at just the right level of detail.

It's like 25 "House" episodes, but without the gratuitous obnoxiousness, condescension to the reader, or the ridiculous constraint that only a limping, misanthropic painkiller addict can be right.

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Awesome!

This book is amazing! I love it and recommend it to my friends. The author formerly wrote for a New York magazine, and his stories cover decades. It is interesting to see how some diseases such as Lyme's first became known and how the tools available to the medical profession have both changed and some have remained the same. Read it, you will love it!

Deadly fogs, horrible diseases, and brilliant medical detectives

Berton Roueché wrote for the "New Yorker" magazine for almost half a century, and was winner of the 1950 Albert Lasker Medical Journalism Award. His many volumes on physicians and medical detectives, including this book, were collected from his articles in the "New Yorker."

"The Medical Detectives" volume II is great bedtime reading, because the good guys, i.e. physicians and epidemiologists always get their villain (whether it's a germ, poison gas, or a disgruntled boyfriend). Volume II's twenty-three case histories date from 1947 to 1984, before the days when Big Insurance dictated how long patients would stay in hospitals and what kind of treatment they would receive. Some of the doctors in this book actually made house calls! A couple of the cases really stayed with me, because the patients were kept in the hospital for weeks at a time just to track down a diagnosis. In one case, a man had the hiccups. In the other, a woman had a headache. Can you guess what would happen to these patients if they went to an emergency room, today?

Anyone who is interested in medical detection will be both engrossed and instructed by Roueché's careful, detailed true-life mysteries. The cases contained in this volume range from the man who hiccupped for 27 years through the deliberate poisoning of a family. One of my favorites from 1948 is called, "The Fog". This does not refer to John Carpenter's famous 1980 horror movie, but a true story that is in some ways even more frightening than anything Hollywood could produce. It takes place in Donora, Pennsylvania, a gritty mill town along the Monongahela River, which is infamous for its fogs: "They are greasy, gagging fogs, often intact even at high noon, and they sometimes last for two or three days."

The Donora `Death Fog' killed 20 people and left hundreds injured and gasping for breath. Roueché tells this story of America's worst air pollution disaster through the observations of eye-witnesses, one of them a physician. London usually comes to mind when Death comes stalking through a thick fog, but this story is every bit as atmospheric as one by A. Conan Doyle, and "The Fog's" detectives are real people.

This collection of true medical stories starts off a bit slowly, but you will end up wishing for Volume III.

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Recommended by Experts to Medical Students

This book was recommended as a gift to a pre-med student. She was excited to receive this as it dove-tailed with a course she is currently taking.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

It all seems routine. You come home from a weekend in the mountains and complain of a headache the next day. Tuesday you have a slight fever and spend the day in bed. But that night, tossing in sweaty sheets, dehydrated, wracked with spasms, you gasp for a doctor and what he prescribes may depend on how alert he has been to the work increasingly done by medical detectives.

These research scientists, laboring alone or in teams, sift through the data supplied by doctors from the front lines of disease. Their solutions are often intuitive and they rely as much on judgment as on what the test tubes show.

"Mysteries, with doctors as the sleuths -- and sometimes culprits!...highly addictive reading." (Chicago Sun-Times)

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