County

April 25, 2011
Ansell's dramatic account of the 17 years he spent at Chicago's 160-year-old public Cook County Hospital (now John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital), rising from intern to chief of the General Internal Medicine and Primary Care Division, presents chilling proof of the indignities, interminable lines, inexcusable delays, inferior facilities, and incomplete care received by uninsured, mostly African-American patients. At County ("a petri dish for vermin"), where clerks ruled the mostly open wards and unsupervised interns learned by trial and error on a "battlefield of medicine," he and his colleagues fought against party politics for funds to keep County open and establish pioneering services (e.g., breast cancer screening, HIV/AIDs care). With the nation's focus on a national health-care policy providing quality medical services to citizens regardless of race, ethnicity, and income level, Ansell's exposé will shock and motivate readers to take a stand on the issue.

July 1, 2011
Ansell, a leading physician, ably describes what it was like to work at the nation's oldest and largest public hospital, Cook County Hospital in Chicago, in the late 1970s and 1980s. The bottom line: it was tough for the doctors and the indigent patients. Ansell notes that black-male life expectancy in Chicago then was less than 65 yearslower than in Bangladesh. No sensationalist, Ansell notes that Cook County Hospital was the birthplace of America's first blood bank, but doesn't mention that it was also the model for the hospital in the NBC drama ER. As renowned physician and activist Quentin Young (a former Cook County doctor) writes in his introduction, despite the hospital's efforts to help the poor and the high quality of its care, Cook County Hospitalis a reflection on our nation's failure, unlike the other major Westernindustrialized nations, to make equal access to health care a right for all. Ultimately, Ansell uses his memoirlike account of life at Cook County Hospitalto argue for health-care reform so that all Americans can get equal care.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)