Cook Robin : Coma (Fm) (Signet) [Mass Market Paperback]

The book "Coma" by Robin Cook is about four medical students entering the freighting world of medicine. The time is February of 1976. Three of the medical students are male and one is female. During this time it was very hard for a female to succeed as a doctor. It is even harder for Dr. Susan Wheeler to succeed when she uncovers a horrifying deception. The deception she uncovers is that a select group of senior doctors at Memorial Hospital are taking patients into minor surgery and making sure they do not ever wake up. The patients are not dead; they are in a comatose state. Susan discovers they are harvesting the patients' body parts. She is out to uncover the truth even if it means risking her own life.

"Coma" is very well-written. It has a lot of great description of the characters and their surroundings. The author also gave very vivid description to the operations and procedures performed in a hospital atmosphere. Although the book was very well-written and the author did a great job of putting the reader in the scene, to read this book one must have a fair amount of learned medical terminology. The author uses a lot of very highly technical medical terms, which makes the reading very hard if one is not sure what is going on. Other than this the book is very suspenseful and great reading.

Author Robin Cook, M.D, published the spine-chilling shocker, written in only two weeks, Coma, in 1978. Cook, not always a novelist, graduated from Columbia University in 1966 and began his work at Harvard University a few years later as a medical doctor. Cook began his writing to get people's awareness dealing with current medical issues that would enlighten the public. Cook's technique involves using his knowledge of medicine and surgery to give clear and accurate descriptions throughout the medical mystery.
Coma takes place in Boston Memorial in the late 1960's. Third year medical student, Susan Wheeler, begins what she thought would be a normal hospital rotation until numerous patients who underwent normal, routine surgery but never awoke and slipped into a irreversible coma. Over a brief period, several events take place. From an unsightly eye, as well as ear-full in the hospital morgue, to endless pursuits lead by an estranged hired hit man, to an illegal institute that had other plans in mind for the comatose patients, other than care. The non-stop entities make for an excellent sci-fi novel. Susan Wheeler is on a personal mission to find an explanation as to why over twelve patients have slipped into irreparable comas after standard surgery in the abominable OR #8.
Cook organized Coma as a diary anecdote. Each new 'chapter' is headed by the date and time to give a precise account of the events that did and will take place. Cook's style of writing stays constant throughout the novel, he is very persuasive yet logical in his writing. Each major event that occurs is not so obvious as to what the outcome will be, yet once uncovered, it makes perfect sense. Coma's text is based on actual medical terminology and diagnosis, yet can be difficult for someone who has little medical knowledge to fully comprehend. Cook's multiple medical word usage was an important factor throughout the novel to understand the over gist of the plot. The various persuasive techniques used by Cook all through the book were most rewarding at the end of the thriller as the mind boggling mystery behind manually induced comatose in OR #8 is finally reveled.

Cook's writing in this novel is mediocre, at best. Yes, his in-depth knowledge of medicine is evident, but maybe a little too evident. Case in point, when he's describing the main character, Susan Wheeler, he says of her physical appearance that she had, " . . . that American, Californian style that made eyes turn and hypothalamuses awaken." Oh, please! That description is, for lack of a better word, cheesy. Who describes someone in such medical terms? It's the kind of comment one doctor might make to another, but for the general reading public, it's just bad - laughably bad. This is only one example. There are several others where it seems the author wants to ensure the reader recognizes his abundant medical knowledge, when his energies would have been better spent focusing on character- and plot-development.
Another hurdle I couldn't overcome was his writing style. He often introduces a character, then repeatedly refers to the character by name when a simple pronoun would suffice. "To Bellows it was incomprehensible how an individual could do so much bodily damage to himself and still keep it up. Bellows did not smoke; Bellows had never smoked. It was incomprehensible to Bellows . . . " I felt like screaming, "Yes, I understand you're talking about BELLOWS!"
I know it sounds as though I'm being petty, but bad writing really bothers me, and this book seems to be chock-full of it. Maybe when I return this book to the library I'll check out another one of Cook's novels, just to give him a fair shot.