Robin Cook | |
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![]() Robin Cook in Warsaw (2008) | |
Born | Robert Brian Cook May 4, 1940 Brooklyn, New York City, New York, United States |
Occupation | |
Education | Wesleyan University (BS) Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons (MD) Ophthalmology at Harvard Public policy at Harvard Kennedy School [1] |
Genre | Thriller |
Relatives | Edgar Lee Cook (father) Audrey Cook (mother) |
Website | |
robincook |
Robert Brian "Robin" Cook (born May 4, 1940) [2] is an American physician and novelist who writes largely about medicine and topics affecting public health.
He is known best for combining medical writing with the thriller genre. Many of his books have been bestsellers on The New York Times Best Seller List. Several of his books have also been featured by Reader's Digest . His books have sold nearly 400 million copies worldwide. [3]
Cook was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Woodside, Queens. He relocated to Leonia, New Jersey when he was eight years old, where he could first have the "luxury" of having his own room. [4] He graduated from Leonia High School in 1958. [5]
Subsequently, Cook graduated from Wesleyan University and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and finished his postgraduate medical training at Harvard. [1]
Cook managed the Cousteau Society's blood-gas laboratory in the south of France. He later became an aquanaut (a submarine doctor) with the U.S. Navy's SEALAB program when he was drafted in 1969. [6] Cook served in the Navy from 1969 to 1971, attaining the rank of lieutenant commander. He wrote his first novel, Year of the Intern , while serving aboard the Polaris-type submarine USS Kamehameha. [2]
The Year of the Intern, was a failure, but Cook began to study bestsellers. [4] He said, "I studied how the reader was manipulated by the writer. I came up with a list of techniques that I wrote down on index cards. And I used every one of them in Coma." [4] He conceived the idea for Coma , about creating illegally a supply of transplant organs, in 1975. [4] In March 1977, that novel's paperback rights sold for $800,000. [4] It was followed by the Egyptology thriller Sphinx in 1979 and another medical thriller, Brain , in 1981. [4] Cook then decided he preferred writing rather than a medical career. [4]
Cook's novels combine medical fact with fantasy. His medical thrillers are designed, in part, to keep the public aware of both the technological possibilities of modern medicine and the socio-ethical problems associated with it. [2] : 73 Cook says he chose to write thrillers because they give him "an opportunity to get the public interested in things about medicine that they didn't seem to know about. I believe my books are actually teaching people." [7]
The author admits he never thought that he would have such compelling material to work with when he began writing fiction in 1970. "If I tried to be the writer I am today a number of years ago, I wouldn't have very much to write about. But today, with the pace of change in biomedical research, there are any number of different issues, and new ones to come," he says. [8]
Cook's novels have anticipated national controversy. In an interview with Stephen McDonald about the novel Shock , Cook admitted the book's timing was fortuitous:
I suppose that you could say that it's the most like Coma in fact that it deals with an issue that everybody seems to be concerned about. I wrote this book to address the stem cell issue, which the public really doesn't know anything about. Besides entertaining readers, my main goal is to get people interested in some of these issues, because it's the public that ultimately should be able to decide which way we ought to go in something as ethically questioning as stem cell research. [8]
To date, Cook has fictionalized issues such as organ donation, fertility treatment, genetic engineering, in vitro fertilization, research funding, managed care, medical malpractice, medical tourism, drug research, and organ transplantation. [7]
"I joke that if my books stop selling, I can always fall back on brain surgery," he says. "But I am still very interested in it. If I had to do it over again, I would still study medicine. I think of myself more as a doctor who writes, rather than a writer who happens to be a doctor." He explained the popularity of his works thus: "The main reason is, we all realize we are at risk. We're all going to be patients sometime," he says. "You can write about great white sharks or haunted houses, and you can say I'm not going into the ocean or I'm not going in haunted houses, but you can't say you're not going to go into a hospital." [8]
Many of his novels concern hospitals (both fictional and non-fictional) in Boston, which may have to do with the fact that he had his post-graduate training at Harvard and lives in Boston, and/ or in New York.
He is on leave from the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. [9]
Cook is a private member of the Woodrow Wilson Center's Board of Trustees. The Board of Trustees, directed by chairman Joseph B. Gildenhorn, are appointed to six-year terms by the President of the United States. [10]
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Coma is Robin Cook's first commercially successful novel, published by Signet Book in 1977. Coma was preceded in 1973 by Cook's lesser-known novel Year of the Intern.
Sphinx is a 1979 novel by Robin Cook. It follows a young American Egyptologist named Erica Baron, on a working vacation in Egypt, who stumbles into a dangerous vortex of intrigue after seeing an ancient Egyptian statue of Seti I in a Cairo market. Cook's third novel, it is one of the few not centered on medicine.
Godplayer is a novel by Robin Cook. It was first released in 1983 in the UK and United States. It has 285 pages. Like most of Cook's other work, it is a medical thriller. Working with her husband, a respected cardiac surgeon, at Boston Memorial is a dream come true for Dr. Cassandra Kingsley—until a series of mysterious deaths rocks the hospital and Cassandra's most frightening suspicions are realized. Amidst a hospital power struggle that pits resident doctors against private practitioners, eighteen cardiac surgery patients mysteriously die. Doctors Cassandra Kingsley and Robert Seibert investigate the deaths, making disturbing discoveries, such as a drug-taking, knife-happy surgeon and lethal IVs.
Francis Paul Wilson is an American medical doctor and author of horror, adventure, medical thrillers, science fiction, and other genres of literary fiction. His books include the Repairman Jack novels—including Ground Zero, The Tomb, and Fatal Error—the Adversary cycle—including The Keep—and a young adult series featuring the teenage Jack. Wilson has won the Prometheus Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Inkpot Award from the San Diego ComiCon, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers of America, among other honors. He lives in Wall, New Jersey.
Coma is a 1978 American mystery thriller film based on the 1977 novel of the same name by Robin Cook. The film rights were acquired by director Michael Crichton, who also wrote the screenplay, and the movie was produced by Martin Erlichmann for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The cast includes Geneviève Bujold, Michael Douglas, Elizabeth Ashley, Richard Widmark, and Rip Torn. Among the actors in smaller roles are Tom Selleck, Lois Chiles, and Ed Harris.
Outbreak is a medical thriller written by Robin Cook and published in 1987. The novel is about an Ebola virus outbreak in the United States.
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Coma is a 2012 American television miniseries based on the 1977 novel Coma by Robin Cook and the subsequent 1978 film Coma. The four-hour medical thriller was originally broadcast on A&E on September 3–4, 2012.