NONFICTION - Feb. 26, 1995

HOSPITAL: An Oral History of Cook County Hospital by Sydney Lewis (The New Press: $25; 350.). When Dr. Murray Franklin arrived at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital in 1946 as a fellow, then a resident, he didn’t receive a paycheck; he lived in a whorehouse, above the bookie joint, and was allowed one meal a day at the hospital. Things weren’t much better the following decade: Dr. Robert Freeark remembers surgeons being required to develop their own blood banks, one intern even standing on a chair in a roomful of patients’ families and yelling, “You goddamn people better bring in some blood.” Dr. Roger Benson recalls the late 1960s; being unable to remove a hypodermic from a patient because of a burr, Cook County then resharpening its own needles and being threatened with a gun by a lab technician who didn’t feel like doing emergency blood work for a lowly intern. These are just a few of the gems to be found in “Hospital,” an oral history compiled and edited by former Studs Terkel assistant Sydney Lewis, and she has done her mentor proud. Lewis’ publisher is marketing the book as a real-life ER and a health-care reality check, but the book stands completely on its own, to a large degree because Cook County is a front-line medical institution, since it now serves primarily an underprivileged, African-American population following the gravitation of insured patients to private institutions. An old-fashioned, unsafe, and badly designed facility, for years firmly tied to Chicago’s corrupt ward politics, the hospital has usually had to make do, with the result that just being in the building has tested mettle and produced innovation. Lewis has talked to just about everyone involved, in the approved Terkel manner; doctors and nurses and patients and administrators, obviously, but also clerks and security guards, custodians and gurney-pushers. And all of them have tales to tell: pediatric nurse Diana Dosie, who tells a stomach-shot kid to stop trying to establish the gang affiliation of other patients by saying “you’re in our gang now--Cook County gang, and I run it”; housekeeper Jewell Jenkins, on being informed that she had no authority to wheel a lonely patient around the hospital, telling her supervisor, “You’re telling me that I’m working in a place where I’m supposed to be a human being, and I can’t be humanly?! “; lung doctor Bob Cohen, who says “my main purpose isn’t in being a doctor--my main purpose is to organize people and try and fight for a communist revolution.” No doubt many of the stories and incidents in “Hospital” will end up on the small screen, but here you can encounter them in their natural, unsanitized habitat.