Here at long last is a “doctor book” in which an M.D. strikes a blow for patients. It is no secret that the science of medicine has tended more and more to consentrate on procedures and techniques while often overlooking the human resotions of patients and their families. A patient is more than a series of symptoms to be treated in a certain way. He is a person: there is a threshold to the suffering he can endure, or should be ask to endure.

“Ward 402” dramatizes these human factors, so often ignored or underrated within the clinical confines of our great teaching hospitals. Dr. Ronald J. Glasser is the Minnesota physician whose “365 days,” based on his experiences with Vietnam war wounded, created such a stir last year. His new book, cast in fictional form, is even more affecting because here Dr. Glasser is dealing with his own specialty, pediatrics. The hospital is a prestigious teaching and training institution staffed by first-rate physicians which has its counterpart in any great American City. We are told that the story it tells is based on fact. Even if you are not a parent, it will haunt your thoughts for days, for weeks.

The first-person narrator is a young intern working in Ward 402, a children’s ward. Mary, the patient, is an 11-year-old girl suffering from leukemia, a fatal diseas but one susceptible to remissions with treatment. Mary is treated with the newest drugs administered in the newest procedures. She is pricked, pumped, jabbed, tapped, given constant medication round the clock. Her father is a knowledgeable lab technician who knows that the girl must die and wants for her only a painless end. The doctors – a whole team of them – se her not as a child in pain but as a patient to be kept alive as long as possible.

Here we have the classic confrontation between human dignity and professional heroics. Step by step Dr. Glasser builds up toward the inevitable confrontation between doctors and parents. The child’s father wants only to spare his daughter unnecessary suffering. The doctors are interested in laboratory tests and in monitoring their medications. An 8.1 statistic is more significant to them than, say, a 7.9. The ward is, in fact, merely a human laboratory. But not to the dying girl’s father, who has seen it happen before.

All this emerges gradually in Dr. Glasser’s carefully crafted narrative. For a busy physician he writes with a surprising grasp of form, dialogue, suspense and dramatic power. The scene in which the doctors persuade the distraught father to let his daughter receive further treatment is handled with the skill of a veteran novelist. So, too, is the sequence in which the father persuades other parents to abandon their unquestioning acceptance of medical procedures and to demand reasons and justifications from the attending M. Ds.  The chilling climax is one that will leave no reader unmoved.

The hero – who could be Dr. Glasser himself – lerans a fundamental lesson from Mary’s case. For the first time it is borne in on him that some hospitals are run for the benefit of the people working in them rather than for the patients. He learns it from an outspoken nurse. “You’re all so smug and self-centered and unapproachable that most parents are just plain afraid to ask you about the things that really bother them. They’re afraid you’ll laugh at them.”

Our doctors, in Dr. Glasser’s phrase, are “programmed for success.” He goes oh1 “The complications, the price paid for each advance, the ‘tradeoffs’ were acknowledged but not presented with the same emphasis as on the accomplishments. Patients had been paraded before us as specimens.” This, mark you, from a doctor on the subject of other doctors. It is a viewpoint which has long needed to be expressed, and I, for one, am glad that it has come so eloquently from an M.D.

“Word 402” has the magic words best seller written all over it, and it wouldn’t have happened to a worthier book. It is a story that will not only leave you deeply shaken but one that demonstrates a maturing writing talent. With all of his professional experience and expertise to draw upon Dr. Glasser seems embarked on a brilliant avocation.
John Harkham Reviews.