AUDIOBOOK
About
The amazing tale of "County" is the story of one of America's oldest and most unusual urban hospitals. From it's inception as a "Poor House" dispensing free medical care to indigents, Chicago's Cook County Hospital has been both a renowned teaching hospital and the healthcare provider of last resort for the city's uninsured. County covers more than thirty years of its history, beginning in the late 1970s when the author began his internship, to the "Final Rounds" when the enormous iconic Victorian hospital building was replaced and hundreds of former trainees gathered to bid it an emotional farewell. Ansell writes of the hundreds of doctors who went through the rigorous training process with him, sharing his vision of saving the world and of resurrecting a hospital on the verge of closing. County is about people, from Ansell's mentors, including the legendary Quentin Young, to the multitude of patients whom he and County's medical staff labored to diagnose and heal. It is a story about politics, from contentious union strikes to battles against “patient dumping”, and public health, depicting the AIDS crisis and the opening of County's HIV/AIDS clinic, the first in the city. Finally, it is about a young man's medical education in urban America, a coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of race, segregation and poverty.
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Reviews
"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."
Publishers Weekly
"Heartbreaking and important…County is written with a kind of lilting rage. Not the dark, destructive kind of rage that hurls rocks and obscenities at anything in its path but an uplifting and creative rage. A rage that says, 'We can do better than this.' A rage that steadily pushes its way toward hope…County is a landmark book, brave and angry and indispensable."
Chicago Tribune
"When it comes to the stories of his patients, many of whom he cared for over decades, from clinic to hospital to funeral, Dr. Ansell soars…We cannot have too many of these stories in circulation, to bear witness, to inform and to inspire."
New York Times