The Deadly Dinner Party: and Other Medical Detective Stories

I share the author's admiration for Berton Roueche's Annals of Medicine column in The New Yorker and his many compilations of those columns. But unfortunately his attempt to write a similar book falls flat; his writing style is not as engaging and graceful as Roueche's, who balanced story-telling and scientific reporting so elegantly well. The cases he chooses to discuss just aren't all that interesting, and I don't sense the same empathy for the sufferers that Roueche managed to convery without resorting to sentimentalism. It's not a bad book--it just isn't as good as others in the genre.

Just when you thought it was safe to drink milk, fresh apple cider, soak in a hot tub at a resort, or even work in your office, this set of medical emergencies which leave doctors scratching their heads. Taken from true cases, with just the identities of the patients changed, these stories read like episodes of House.

Following investigators with the Center of Disease Control & Prevention in some cases are called in when multiple similar cases arise which have all the hallmarks of an impending epidemic. Following their steps in trying to identify not only what's actually wrong with the patient that's causing their kidney failure, double vision, months of headaches, bloody bowels, muscle weakness, impending death and accumulating fluid show more in the abdomen among other alarming problems but also the cause of the problems are really fascinating.

The author also adds information about some historical cases, information about certain bacteria and their effect on the human body, in addition to different medical treatments and procedures. All in all, a very interesting book, even if some of the stories have made me ask our building manager how often their clean out the air vents in the building and rethink buying apple cider from a nearby farm. show less

This isn't as good as The Medical Detectives, which is probably an unfair comparison to make except that the author himself makes it a couple of times. Rather than being focused on the chain of logic that gets you from "this weird thing is happening to someone" to "this weird thing happened to cause it," most of these stories are more of an exercise in public health education - be aware of these things that can sometimes (rarely) cause an easily mis-diagnosable problem.

The summary of this book really put too much emphasis on how "thrilling" it would be. While a decent read, the stories do drag on a little and I found myself getting bored a lot. It ended up being less mystery and more medical history than I thought it would be. Edlow seems to talk just for the sake of talking at times. He explains things that I don't really see as relevant or important, leaving me lost and waiting to get to the point.

Overall it was well-written, I'll give it that, but it just wasn't as good as I expected. I'd recommend this to folks who are more interested in the particulars of unusual diseases and parasites, or just medical cases in general. Just be ready for a lot of background and not much focus on the cases themselves.

I read this because I like the TV show House, and the general idea of a book about diagnostic medicine in the context of unusual symptoms. I enjoyed reading this book, and learned a little (no more apple cider at little Christmas tree farms for me, unless I ask about how they wash their apples!), but the material was fairly dated. In other words, most of the detective stories are set in the 70s or 80s, and would nowadays be solved much more easily because of MRIs and CT scans and the like. In other words, this wasn't quite as modern as I expected it to be.

The Deadly Dinner Party is a collection of medical maladies that required a certain degree of physician footwork to identify and treat. It's a good bathroom reader (short, self-contained stories that aren't too wordy), though it's probably a horrible idea to read if you're a hypochondriac.

Stories of unusual diseases and unexpected outbreaks. The problem is, this is a pretty well-trodden subject, and Edlow doesn't add anything to it. He's got some interesting anecdotes, but his writing is flighty and scattered. Too many tangents; not enough new material. It's not bad, but there are better books out there in medical-mystery-land.