Final Duty
Paul Carson
William Heinemann, £10,
pp 321
ISBN 0 434 00825 7
Rating: 3/4
Jack Hunt, Irish academic cardiologist,
has a CV as long as your arm and a
compelling sense of vocation. Temperamentally hostile to the least suggestion
of compromise, he is "totally unused to the
commercial realities of clinical medicine."
With his long suffering wife Beth and his
eight year old son Danny, he has travelled
the world - Sydney, London, Philadelphia,
New York - in search of the right job. Until
now, his career has been waiting to happen.
But no sooner has he arrived at the
Carter Hospital in Chicago, than the appar
ently motiveless murder of his professor
catapults him into the top job. An unlikely
big cheese, he soon comes to realise that the
hospital wants political skills (not his
strongest suit) as much as medical ones. On
the other hand, the $300 000 salary has its
compensations.
For a while, all Jack has to cope with are
the things that go with the territory - a punishing medical and administrative schedule,
and the sudden need to grow into an
affluent lifestyle. But then he drops his
bombshell: "As from now all contacts with
the pharmaceutical industry are banned."
This comes at a particularly difficult time for
the hospital which has just done a deal with
multinational drug company Zemdon to
help launch its new cardiac wonder drug,
which they hope will be bigger than Viagra.
Jack's research interest is the role that
infection during childhood might have in
the early development of heart disease, and
this - as much as his refusal to meet Zemdon
representatives - spells major trouble. Following an assault on his son, the daylight
trashing of his car, and the mysterious death
of a coresearcher, he fails a random drug
test and is sacked. At this point he decides to
fight back, a decision that takes him to the
West Coast and involves him in a life and
death struggle to expose the corruption at
the heart of Zemdon.
Final Duty is an accomplished pageturner of a medical thriller - a selfstyled tale
of "falsified lab tests, backstabbing colleagues and murderous corporations."
The medical profession does not come
out of it conspicuously well. Jack's two most
senior lieutenants at the Carter, for example,
are a lush and a gambling addict who is operating a stock market scam in his spare time.
But at least the bad guys know what
they're about, from the elderly Swiss doctor,
beneath whose immaculately doublebreasted exterior there beats a heart of pure
evil, to the bleachedblonde, South African
hit man. Their job is to be as nasty as possible, and their enthusiasm for their role is
beyond question.
John Melmoth, freelance journalist
Email: email
studentBMJ 2001;09:171-216 June ISSN 0966-6494
