Cook County ICU by Cory Franklin MD

This book was not in my spreadsheet, and no other books by Franklin are there, so I’m curious why I feel I’ve read this book before. It’s possible I’d missed putting it in my spreadsheet, it wouldn’t be the first time, but audible.com says that I hadn’t started it. I wonder if it is simply that all books by M.D.s include related stories.

Although the title is Cook County ICU many of the stories are from medical institutions that Franklin learned in or worked in before getting to Cook County.

This book is the typical episodic memoir where the chapters have collections of stories that are more or less connected. There were a couple of stories that I found worth sharing. First are his experiences with admissions due to social reasons such as drunks admitted allowing them to sober up. Franklin had to be creative in the diagnoses he put in their charts to appease the requirements of the administration. He also relayed his experience with patients with DTs. This reminded me of a story my sister told me about a friend of hers who was in the hospital for a non-alcohol related condition. However, he was an habitual inebriate, so he was prescribed a beer on a regular basis to avoid the effects of withdrawal. I wonder if Cook County Hospital did that in the time of Dr. Franklin.

The other story I enjoyed was about working with Harrison Ford on the filming of The Fugitive, which was partly set in CCH. Dr. Franklin served as a consultant on the film to help Ford and the producers make the medical aspects of the film as realistic as possible. I enjoyed hearing about Franklin’s experience with the film and the stories about working with and watching Harrison Ford.

I liked listening to this book even though the stories seemed so familiar. Dr. Franklin was humble and wise, and I agreed with his feelings about the commercial rather than altruistic nature of modern medicine. On the other hand, I think the improvements in electronic records have shown that his concerns about them to be unfounded. Doctors can now enter both formulaic and open-ended information, alleviating the problem of template-based information. More important is that medical personnel can use quantitative and graphical data analysis of a patient’s data in seconds, giving the physician a quick and powerful tool for seeing patterns and making diagnoses.

I may have just read too many of these types of memoirs, and that’s why it sounded so familiar. I’ll have to be more careful when choosing non-fiction medicine-based books in the future.