The Victim is Always the Same

by I. S Cooper

This taut, compelling drama centers on a radical brain operation performed on two little girls with a horrible and disfiguring disease, dystonia musculorum deformans. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060108568
• ISBN13: 9780060108564
• Release Date: January 1973
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Victim is ALways the Same

Of course I love this book. The girl (janet) is really my daughter and the course of her struggle to get a diagnosis....I am surprised it is still in print, but I heard it is used as a text book for medical students...An interesting thing is that just yesterday our daughter had her 7th brain surgery, a deep brain stimulator was placed in her brain and the old stimulator taken out...She was also awake for this surgery and came out smiling! I brought this book to give to a new member of our family so that she could be informed of this disease. I have brought several copies over the years and given them to other families. It is an easy read and a real testimony to Dr. Cooper who was the first surgeon to try this surgery on a child. He passed away many years ago, but he was our hero because he saved our daughters life.

Reveiw of "The Victim is Always the Same"

This is a book about medical ethics, written from a viewpoint that only a medical doctor could be privy to, but with tremendous insight and compassion for the point of view of the patient. It is a deeply thoughtful book; profound, and yet written with great simplicity and clarity. The questions it poses are addressed to the medical profession, but anyone who has ever struggled to get adequate treatment from the medical profession will find it equally important to read, and will experience a strong sense of affirmation and a realization that they are not alone. Moreover, the questions are ones that the medical profession will probably never attempt to respond to, unless they are asked by a great many more people. The case studies that Dr. Cooper uses to illustrate his point of view have to do with a condition called muscular dystonia (dystonia musculorum deformans), because the surgical treatment of that condition was his specialty. The book came to my attention because of the fact that my own son suffers from this same condition, and I will freely admit that the book is particularly important to me for that reason. But I very strongly believe that the questions that are being asked are of much broader importance than the specific condition. They are questions that relate not only to the medical profession as a whole, but to any and every field of service that has become weighted down with bureaucracy. As such, the book is even more important now than when it was first published nearly thirty years ago