by Lori Andrews

Robin Cook attended medical school before the birth of the patients’ rights and bioethics movements.  Last month in New York at Thrillerfest, the national meeting of thriller writers, Cook explained that he began writing medical mysteries as a way to make the public aware of the dangers and risks inherent in modern medicine.

“Patients used to come to me and say, ‘I want to be put to sleep during the operation.’  They had no idea what was going on.  I’d say to them, ‘It’s not like being put to sleep.  It’s like being poisoned and then revived.'”

He turned to fiction to take people behind the closed doors of hospitals and scientific laboratories.  As I listened to him speak, I realized that an entire bioethics course could be taught by assigning his novels.

Coma, published in 1977 and later made into a movie with Michael Crichton as the director,  highlighted concerns about organ harvesting.  Subsequent books covered issues at the forefront of medicine, from in vitro fertilization (Mutation) to managed care (Critical).  Cook’s powers of prediction even extend to the use of medical technologies beyond hospitals.  His novel Vector, dealing with bioterrorists using anthrax, was published two years before the 2001 anthrax attacks.

Throughout his writing career, Robin Cook has carefully scrutinized the American medical profession and found it lacking.  When he undertook research on medical outsourcing to India for his 2008 book, Foreign Bodies, he learned that, contrary to the American view of the quality of less expensive health care abroad, the Indian facilities he visited often offered higher quality services than those in the United States.

“When I finished medical school, the only media portrayals of doctors were positive — television shows like Dr. Marcus Welby, Dr. Kildare, Dr. Ben Casey,” Cook said.  His books are situated at the other extreme, focusing on risks of unbridled commercialism, scientific malfeasance, and professional egos trampling patient needs. But by lulling patients out of unwarranted deference to doctors, Cooks helped create a consumer movement pressing for appropriate oversight of the medical profession.