Review By Harsimran Kaur | Rating: 4/5

Twenty three year old Michael Fuller is also ‘Mitt’ as an appellation, and has just begun his surgical residency at the paramount Bellevue hospital. He is charismatic and belongs to an opulent lineage of surgical masters, the ‘Fuller Fief’. Mitt is now a part of it and is hopeful to not led down his ancestors but the salutary El Dorado turns into a eldritch ripening the cochlea hearing uncanny sounds and smelling the putrid pride of the gargoyle ghosts.
Mitt has a lot to look forward to as a surgical resident. The surgeries lined up are a sine qua non to get hold over the procedures and learn the intricacies much like following a contrivance of suturing a graft or looking into the forbidden fever or disrupted bowel sounds after an abdominal surgery. However, gradually nothing seems in place for Mitt Fuller as his patients start dying. He is left bewildered and surrounded by contrapuntal blithe scourging like a valley of ants, undeterred, usurping the sanity of the flexed mind. The sudden mysterious deaths make him inexorably rigid in flesh, contemporaneously itched by a puff of paresthesia and the ill-disposed squall of the grotty smell.
So, what is happening to his patients?
A vein stripping surgery leaves the electrolyte imbalance in a coup de grace. The bursting of the graft in one of the patients aorta leads to a swollen abdomen and one find the sutures opening in a fanatic flounce. Adding more salt to the wound, the breast biopsy and mastectomy results in a cardiac arrest. For one of the patient’s, hard to believe though, it’s a devilish dance when hit by a thyroid storm.
This all leaves Mitt devastated questioning his ‘jinxed enervate’ and feels he may soon be labeled by his team as a disreputable de trop.
The master story-teller, Robin Cook has the ability to demystify the ‘medical ministrations’ that is usually understood andante, and one is rendered to reflect on the uncertainties and angst surrounding life. A gossamer of gruesome deaths leaving you with a feeling on gullibility, ‘Bellevue’ is a cumulonimbus of a tapered past falling heavily on the depredations lurking in the hospital.
- Is the story detonating a ghostly goulash? Yes!
- Can medicine leave an animadversion to its own vulnerability? Often so!
- Who finally pays for the fallacious outcomes? Do surgeons follow their impressionistic opulence or the life of patients must become a pyritic victory?
If the sudden death of patients makes fury well up Mitt’s chest, the incursion of his ancestral lineage professing ‘surgical sophistry’ makes bile rise in his throat and breath catch in his lungs. So, is the ‘Fuller Family of Surgeons’ a bunch of solipsistic and self-opinionated messiahs and is it now that Mitt had to pay for their pernickety provincialism?
Is there a direct connection between the patients dying and the past perfidies?
What Mitt is seeing and assimilating, does it amount to puerile hallucinations or past has its way to roll the carpet deceiving the dust?
What he is looking through his eyes makes his heart crawl; a preadolescent girl with a long slim stick that protuberates out of the eye socket. Is he delusional or the girl wants to say something to him? There is this forlorn patient carrying an amputated leg and some others stretching out their broken limbs. Is this actually happening; dead bodies berserk in ambulatory distress? The past definitely throttling on coarse vengeance. He has to find out the reason for the psychiatric building turned into an abattoir; nonetheless if all this could take his life.
Mitt has to decide; if it’s more important to protect his patients from dying like leaves falling off the branches in autumn or continue as a resident surgeon under moral priggishness? He looks into the past that has left him apologetically pendulous repelling a self-sabotaged present.
TAKE AWAY
Gripping! A true Robin Cook ‘Medical Mystery’.
One Response
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