Michael Palmer (novelist)

Michael Stephen Palmer, M.D. (born October 9, 1942, Springfield, Massachusetts, United States), is the author of 16 novels, often called medical thrillers. His novels have made the New York Times bestseller list and have been translated into 35 languages.

Education

He graduated from Wesleyan University with a pre-med major, and with "sort of a Russian minor." He then went to Case Western Reserve University for medical school. Palmer trained in internal medicine^[1] at Boston City and Massachusetts General Hospitals, spent 20 years as a full-time practitioner of internal and emergency medicine, and is now an associate director of the Massachusetts Medical Society's physician health program.

Writing

Palmer claims he never wanted to be a writer. He didn't think he had much "flair" for it, even though he read in his spare time. In 1978 he read Dr. Robin Cook's medical thriller Coma. Palmer thought if Cook, also a Wesleyan graduate, could write a novel, then he could too.^[2]

Before he began work on his first published novel, The Sisterhood, about euthanasia, Palmer was practicing treatment of drug addiction. His first book was rejected, but The Sisterhood, in which nurses aiming to end human suffering by killing the patient, made the New York Times bestseller list - something repeated by all his subsequent novels to this day.

Side Effects, his second published work, was about the testing of unapproved drugs on a patient in Nazi Germany, but his most famous novel proved to be 1991's Extreme Measures, in which a promising young doctor is threatened by a hospital elite after discovering the body's criminal acts. Natural Causes (1994) is about a holistic doctor who prescribes medicine that actually kills patients, whilst Miracle Cure is about a drug for heart disease that actually is very dangerous because of its side effects.

The 1996 thriller film Extreme Measures, starring Hugh Grant, Gene Hackman and Sarah Jessica Parker, is based on Palmer's book of the same name.

Novels

1. The Sisterhood (book) (1982), ISBN 0-553-27570-4
2. Side Effects (1985), ISBN 0-553-27618-2
3. Flashback (book) (1988), ISBN 0-553-27329-9
4. Extreme Measures (book) (1991), ISBN 0-553-29577-2
5. Natural Causes (book) (1994), ISBN 0-553-56876-0
6. Silent Treatment (book) (1995), ISBN 0-553-57221-0
7. Critical Judgment (book) (1996), ISBN 0-553-57408-6
8. Miracle Cure (book) (1998), ISBN 0-553-57662-3
9. The Patient (book) (2000), ISBN 0-553-58038-8
10. Fatal (book) (2002), ISBN 0-553-58361-1
11. The Society (book) (2004), ISBN 0-553-58362-X
12. The Fifth Vial (book) (2007), ISBN 0-553-58362-X
13. The First Patient (book) (2008), ISBN 0-312-34353-1
14. The Second Opinion (book) (2009), ISBN 9780312343552
15. The Last Surgeon (book) (2010), ISBN 9780312587499
16. A Heartbeat Away (book) (2011), ISBN 9780312587529
17. Oath of Office (book) (2012), ISBN 9780312587536

References

1. ^ http://www.michaelpalmerbooks.com/bio.html
2. ^ http://www.michaelpalmerbooks.com/bio.html

External links

• Michael Palmer's homepage

Persondata
Name	Palmer, Michael
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Date of birth	October 9, 1942
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Date of death
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