Intensive Care

Glamorous, dynamic, and headstrong, Celine de la Roche has placed her life in the hands of the brilliant Dr. Caleb Winter, who must overcome his growing passion for his dying patient in order to save her life and make medical history

In this startling yarn, surgeon Caleb Winter resolves to make history by performing the world's first pancreas transplant. His patient is a formidable publisher, Celine de La Roche, who has nice legs and a virulent tumor. But a company about to market oral insulin has bribed Henry Brighton, an idiot who runs the hospital's surgery department, to lobby against the transplant, so things seem bleak for de La Roche. What's worse, she has fallen in love with Winter, who has a big problem himself. His immunologist, a Yugoslavian emigre whose work is vital to the transplant, has taken to beating and raping his dates. Roe ( Doctors and Doctors' Wives ), meanwhile, treats us to a likable straight man (Dr. Ambrose "Porky" Rosen), anatomy lessons ("perfectly shaped breasts") and even equestrian events ("she rode him like a horse"). In a ripely dramatic denouement, the hospital's board votes down the transplant, leaving de La Roche's fate very much in doubt. Unfortunately, a meritorious resolution is marred by truly weird players and frequently grisly narrative.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A brilliant surgeon plans to transplant a pancreas, and lesser mortals plan to stop him before he puts artificial insulin out of business. The author is a surgeon now specializing in novels (Doctors and Doctors' Wives, 1990). The pancreas in distress belongs to beautiful French aristocrat Celine de la Roche, whose hot little Manhattan publishing company is about to make the leap to the big-time level and whose husband may be about to make the leap into the arms of someone less driven than Celine. All leaps are off, though, when Celine swoons in her limo from pancreatic distress and is referred to Dr. Caleb Winter, who knows all there is to know about problem pancreases and whose research is leading to the world's first ape- to-person pancreas transplant. Dr. Winter's thoracic palpations detect just the right kind of tumor for his great experiment. They also set off little waves of passion in Celine, who had thought she didn't like him very much. The pancreas is not the only problem for Caleb and Celine. Caleb's critically important Yugoslavian lab assistant can't control his satyriasis; his nurse can't control her masochistic nymphomania; and his department head is in the pay of the unscrupulous European insulin industry. Celine, meanwhile, must cope with a sadistic nurse, unfriendly corporate buyouts, and a disintegrating marriage. Medical melodrama. For the beach-bag. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.