Hospital

"The future of medical care is now high on the nation's political agenda, but few understand what it is really like to treat America's ill in the very battle trenches of American medicine. In Hospital, Sydney Lewis, long-time assistant to Studs Terkel, uses Chicago's Cook County Hospital as a telling microcosm of both the human and the social problems we face as a country. Lewis's probing interviews with the widest possible range of people involved in running the hospital - from a former director to an elevator operator, from a security guard to the head of the trauma unit - elicit extraordinary stories and frank assessments of the American medical system in general and Cook County Hospital in particular."--BOOK JACKET. "Here are the exasperated yet hopeful accounts of the emergency-room doctors who, horrified by the bullet-riddled bodies of the same teenagers month after month, have started an anti-violence education program in the schools. Here is an angry account of the rise of tuberculosis, a disease long thought eliminated, as well as the more familiar tribulations of those dealing with AIDS, drugs, and the other plagues of postindustrial society. Here, too, are older doctors recalling the corrupt and patronage-driven old days, when a note from your alderman was enough to get a job or a few months of bed rest for an obstreperous relative."--BOOK JACKET.