For years, William Louis Harvey recalled the details of cases that he had reviewed as an expert witness, chair of a malpractice review committee, and as a treating physician. Noticing that nobody else had written about this important time in medical and legal history, he set out to accurately describe it.
Efforts to put limits on the size of monetary awards by juries in malpractice cases went on for years, finally resulting in what is now known as Tort Reform. California did this in 1975, with the passage of the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act (MICRA), which could be a model for tort reform.
Like any good writer, when Harvey began to develop and write the life stories of the three main characters in Malpractice the Novel, they became real to him. He found that some of the material seemed to “write itself”. Included in this, was a sexual history for the characters, which he felt was integral. Just as he began to question how sexually explicit to be in his book, Harvey read an essay by Katie Roiphe positing that the current generation of male novelists avoid incorporating sex into their novels. It was then that Harvey decided to “try to return sex to the American novel”, but with “redeeming social value”.
Malpractice! the Novel is an electrifying work of realistic fiction written by an anonymous insider who worked the frontlines of the clash between the medical and legal professions during the California medical malpractice insurance crisis, which began in the 1960s. William Louis Harvey, a nom de plume, takes readers on a steamy adventure involving power, sex, lies and money in this candid courtroom suspense thriller. While Malpractice! The Novel, is a work of fiction, it is rooted in the personal experiences and firsthand knowledge the author acquired during his decades of working inside the medical industry. California in the 1960s and first half of the 1970s had already seen a dramatic increase in medical malpractice lawsuits as juries awarded progressively higher sums for “pain and suffering,” a category that had no concrete limits and caused physicians’ insurance premiums for malpractice to skyrocket. Harvey chaired a committee that reviewed all malpractice claims involving a major California hospital during the crisis. Details of some of the cases he experienced are engraved in his memory, and small portions of these tidbits find their way into Malpractice! the Novel, his first novel. Roused by a recent New York Times article about the American male novelist’s fear of addressing sexuality, Harvey interleaved honest sex histories for his novel’s characters, adding a titillating sensuality to the suspenseful novel.
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Genre – Steamy Courtroom Drama
Rating – R
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