BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : The Awful Secrets of Medicine’s Graveyard : WRONGFUL DEATH: A Medical Tragedy <i> by Sandra Gilbert</i> ; Norton $22.50, 365 pages

It is an awful thing to say, but as you’ll see, absolutely true and meant as a great compliment: If anyone was going to fall prey to a fatal flaw in this country’s medical system, thank goodness it was the Gilbert family.

Which is not to say that they were in any way deserving of such dreadful karma. Quite the contrary; they are a delicious family.

The blessing is that the Gilberts had the tools with which to fight a medical bureaucracy that preferred to turn away from the problem, as though it might disappear if they simply ignored it. Anyone who reads this book will come out the other end a different kind of patient--which is just the kind of health-care reform we need.

At the start of this decade, poet/writer/professor Sandra Gilbert was your basic happy academic. She wrote poetry; she taught; she basked in the reflected happiness of her children. And she savored a 34-year marriage to her husband, Eliot, a sardonic wit who shared her love of literature and enthusiasm for life.

When Eliot received a diagnosis of prostate cancer at age 60, he and Sandra did what any responsible couple would do--consulted various doctors, got opinions on top of opinions. They took advantage of their academic connections and landed in the office of Dr. deVere White, a top urologist at UC Davis and a sparkling Irishman who urged Eliot, “a young man,” to have surgery because it could buy him 20 or 30 years. The risks were dramatic, but statistically unlikely, and the payoff was great. The Gilberts decided to go ahead.

About seven hours after what Sandra and her two daughters were told was successful surgery (and after they were sent away for lunch and dinner by that jolly surgeon), Eliot Gilbert was dead.

“Why?” is the question that drives this book.

For weeks Gilbert and her daughters and son combed their memories for information they might fashion into a serviceable explanation--but everything led them to the same awful conclusion. Eliot Gilbert died because the medical team attending him had done something so wrong that there was no remedy.

As hard as it seems to publicly accuse that elegantly aloof surgeon and his associates of causing a man’s death, Sandra Gilbert’s love for her husband demanded that she seek retribution.

Gilbert is a marvelous writer who manages deftly to balance melancholy and self-deprecating humor, to be frank and gentle. To her credit, she unflinchingly shows what it is like to face a loved one’s illness, including the times when her fear prevents her from being as supportive to Eliot as she would like to be.

It is one of the frustrations of writing nonfiction that the author can’t make events turn out any way other than they do. There are no anguished confessions of incompetence in “Wrongful Death.” Gilbert doesn’t awake on a storm-tossed night to find White on her doorstep, begging for absolution.

The legal system, as she sees it, treats all plaintiffs like greedy cranks and does little to make sure that medical people will mend their ways.

All she comes away with, in the end, is the knowledge that Eliot Gilbert bled to death--and the financial settlement allowed her by state law. She will never know exactly why he died, nor does she feel she collected her full pound of flesh.

Still, it is almost impossible to put the book down, and Gilbert sounds a warning worth heeding. Ironically, it only rings false when she drags in quote after quote from books on grief to bolster her case. She didn’t need to call additional witnesses. Her story stands all too well on its own.