Medical Thriller / Historical Mystery
Date Published: Sept. 21, 2023
Publisher: Books Fluent
Narrator: Scott Graff
Run Time: 9 hours, 8 minutes
Dr. Randall Archer is a misfit....
....in the brutal blue-collar home where he grew up.
....as a 16-year-old escaping to college, then medical school, on a full
scholarship to Harvard.
....in the highest echelons of Boston society, where the woman he marries
and the blueblood research partner with whom he shares his laboratory
belong.
Even Archer’s brilliance as a pathologist catapults him into direct
and dangerous conflict with the medical establishment he fought so hard to
join.
As the Great Depression presses down around him, Archer teeters at the edge
of a precipice. He must choose between his hard-won career and the sacred
oaths he took as a doctor and scientist—before all his choices are
lost forever.
Ratatouille Rat's Review: "I found zis story very 'arrowing. Mon Dieu, zat part with ze rats gave me ze nightmares!"
Ornery Owl's Review
Four out of Five Stars
I listened to this compelling story over the course of two days. I appreciated the overall plot and character development as well as a scathing and unfortunately true assessment of the medical community contained within the fictionalized memoir of Dr. Randall Archer.
The story begins with Randall as a precocious sixteen-year-old Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania high school student just before the stock market crash. Randall is abused by his father and older brothers who believe he needs to be knocked down a peg or two and accept life working in the steel mills. Randall's counselor, a twenty-one-year-old woman named Fidella Dolkowski, affectionately known as Miss Della, pulls strings with her powerful second cousin at Harvard to get Randall admitted on a scholarship.
When Randall decides he can no longer endure his family's abuse or the prospect of spending his life working in a steel mill, he arrives at Miss Della's apartment in a state of desperation. The next day he is on a train to Boston, leaving Pittsburgh behind forever to begin an intense new adventure on the path to pursuing his dream of becoming a renowned pathologist.
The story's treatment of Miss Della is my reason for subtracting a star from my rating. I appreciated Miss Della's pluckiness in facing off against Randall's intimidating father but was disappointed when she ended up becoming Randall's first sexual experience. I found this plot point inappropriate on the one hand and disappointingly predictable on the other. Further, when Randall again sees Miss Della several years after this incident, he seems disdainful of the fact that she dared to age and is no longer the same slim, waifish young woman he bedded before taking advantage of the opportunity she provided him. The exchange between them at this juncture of the story is grim.
The depictions of the research conducted by Randall and his physicist partner Dr. Adam Wakefield, who is hoping to create an improved microscope, are realistic and compelling. The difficulties faced by Randall's wife Elizabeth in obtaining a teaching position during an era when women were expected to be helpmeets to the men they marry were also depicted realistically.
The medical community is often depicted as constantly pursuing breakthroughs to lessen suffering and help people live longer, happier lives. However, as this story reveals, there is a darker, profit-driven side to the medical community. Those who threaten to upend the established order may very well find themselves facing difficulties including loss of livelihood and threats to their well-being.
Overall, I found Human Trial a compelling, well-written medical mystery revealing that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Greed will always trump innovation and welfare in any established hierarchy. Those who want to do the right thing will find themselves facing an uphill battle.
The story's narrator was a perfect choice. Without becoming melodramatic, his inflections injected the perfect amount of drama and excitement into this audiobook.
About the Author
Audrey Gale long dreamed of being a writer, but never anticipated the
circuitous road she’d take to get there. After twenty-plus years in
the banking industry, she grew tired of corporate gamesmanship and pursued
her master’s in fiction writing at the University of Southern
California. Her first novel, a legal thriller entitled The Sausage Maker's
Daughters, was published under the name A.G.S. Johnson. Her second, The
Human Trial, is the first book in a medical thriller trilogy inspired by
Gale’s own experiences with the gap between traditional medicine and
approaches based on the findings of the great physicists of the 20th
Century. Both The Sausage Maker’s Daughters and The Human Trial
incorporate Gale’s fascination with historical and scientific
research, and always with women finding their places. Gale lives in Los
Angeles with her husband and dogs where she is found hiking the Santa Monica
Mountains every chance she gets.
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