The Aesculapian

Dan Cloud

Frederic C Beil, £18.44, pp 359

ISBN 0 913720 98 4

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The American Medical Association (AMA) has a propensity for what might be dubbed autopedicide—shooting itself in the foot. It recently had to extricate itself, at a cost of almost $10m, from an ill conceived promotional partnership with an electrical products company and then precipitately fired its long time journal editor for what seemed to be, at worst, a minor lapse of editorial judgment.

But none of that compares with the antics of the fictional AMA portrayed in this first novel by Dan Cloud, a former president of the association. Here, a …