The Terminal Man

The Terminal Man is a novel by the American writer Michael Crichton, published in April 1972 and serialised in Playboy that spring.

Crichton was trained as a physician and had already written several thrillers, and this book is the one in which his medical knowledge and his taste for technical argument fit together most tightly. Benson is intelligent, uncooperative and aware that the hospital staff regard him as a case rather than a patient, and the novel gives the reader the surgeons' discussions in detail: the risks they have accepted, the staff psychiatrist's objections, and the fact that nobody involved has enough experience with the procedure to be certain how it will behave. Between the scenes of the operation and the aftermath, Crichton inserts charts, graphs and passages from the medical literature, so the reader is asked to read the situation as the doctors would. The plot then leaves the hospital, since Benson escapes and the question becomes a manhunt conducted in a city by the people who created him. It was Crichton's second novel under his own name and his twelfth in total, and it was filmed in 1974.