Cook County ICU

July 13, 2015
Franklin, former ICU director of Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, girds his memoir with a simple yet powerful philosophy: as his medical career has been guided by his heart, he wants his profession as a whole to be grounded in empathy. The stories in this deeply humanist collection feature former patients, some well known and many well loved; remarkable fellow doctors prone to extreme arrogance; medical mysteries solved without the sleuths receiving their due attention; close encounters with celebrities; and Franklin’s own fleeting celebrity, including his technical advisor role on the Harrison Ford thriller The Fugitive. But Franklin, whose father also worked at Cook County, mostly writes of his love for a revered “charity hospital,” his profession, and the patients who made them both memorable. One such patient was CW, an elderly man whose heart was failing due to a bacterial infection caused by pulling out a tooth with some pliers. The “fancy doctors” scoffed at this “simple man from Texas who had no access to a dentist and no other recourse,” writes Franklin; “they had lost their empathy for people like CW long ago.” In a medical landscape dominated by “big business, a maze of profit centers, and bureaucracy,” Franklin’s fond memories contain seeds of pessimism about the future.

Starred review from September 1, 2015
Franklin spent 25 years as director of intensive care at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, the focus of this sparkling collection of anecdotes. Now known as Stroger Hospital, Cook County was built in 1916 to treat cholera patients. During the 1940s and 1950s, it was a major international center of medical instruction and research. The stories Franklin shares are about the doctors, nurses, and patients he has encountered over the years as well as the occasional celebrity, some royal (Princess Diana), some notorious (serial killers Richard Speck and John Wayne Gacy). He writes with great empathy and gentle humor about emergency room patients. He acknowledges his habit of being unable to hold his tongue when confronted by rudeness, even as he admits his own moments of arrogance. He even makes a violent street gang member an object of pity. Franklin's story about being technical advisor to the 1993 film The Fugitive and his working relationship with Harrison Ford is wonderfully humorous and insightful. In the end, he laments the depersonalization of modern medicine as the new health care model is based more on making a profit than actually helping people heal. Franklin provides an excellent firsthand perspective on life in the medical trenches.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)