Charles GraeberBesprekingen

A jaw-dropping story. The reaction of the hospitals where this killer nurse worked might be the most amazing thing in the whole tale.

What a good book. Charles Cullen , a nurse who killed patients over 16 years. Terrifying to realize how many times he could have been 'caught', but the hospitals did not do a good job with this.

This book, extensively well researched, tells the story of Charlie Cullen, a nurse who worked in many hospitals and ultimately was responsible for hundreds of patient deaths. The book is a fascinating read, one that will stick with you for a while. It really made me wonder just how vulnerable one is when they go to a hospital. How many other Charlies are out there? The story is absolutely terrifying. After reading the book, I am afraid to go into a hospital. I know that is irrational, but that is how realistic and frightening the book is.

The book details how Cullen injected drugs into the IV bags and ports to kill the patients. When terminated from one hospital, he simply moved on to another hospital and continued moving from one hospital to another. Many of the hospitals suspected he was responsible for the sudden spike in patient deaths, but for fear of their reputation they refused to divulge this information when his next potential employer called them for references. The hospitals also failed to notify authorities for fear of their reputation taking a hit. Hospitals need patients and potential patients might go elsewhere if a hospital has a history of many unusual and frequent deaths. As a result, the hospitals were complicit in the patient deaths. Hospitals were in such dire need of nurses, many failed to properly check out his past references, or turned a blind eye when some of his dates of employment failed to match up.

The book details how police detectives were able to take a case based solely on circumstantial evidence and secure a confession out of Cullen. If you love to read true crime or just want to read an excellent story detailing the crime and the arrest of Charlie Cullen, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Holy…what the fuck…wow. That book was intense, and baffling. It was very good, but I need more! Why did he do it, was he just that insane? How did the hospitals and workers not get punished in the least? Withholding evidence, covering up multiple murders, how?! Being from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, how have I not heard of this earlier? Absolutely insane!

I expected more from this book. While the story itself is fascinating, I found the writing tedious and forced, especially in the beginning of the book. The writer took too much time to build his case for why Charlie Cullen was doing the things he did. It was just difficult to read. It wasn't until the detectives got involved that the story started to read in a compelling way.

I’m not a fan of true crime graphic murder podcasts or books. I can’t handle the gore. This nonfiction book tells the terrifying story of the prolific serial killer who killed by injecting drugs into the IV bags of his patient, but it’s not gruesome. It’s incredibly well-written and hard to put down. Excellent journalism, researched but not overwhelmed by facts. The author tells the story more in the style of In Cold Blood, connecting you to the people involved.

A close look at the 16 year killing spree of a nurse starting in the 1980s. It was just astonishing to hear how easy it was for him to find a new job at the next hospital and that no hospital was willing to inform the police about the possible killings until he had killed hundreds of patients!

This was a weird, weird story. A nurse spent years killing people with a variety of drug cocktails. He admitted to 40 murders but it could have been hundreds, no one really knows. What I found most remarkable about this story is the way he was shuffled from hospital to hospital, and each time they started to realize something bad was happening hospital administrators covered it up as quickly as they could and gave him a clean reference to get the next job. They were way more concerned about liability and keeping the issues quiet than actually keeping people from dying.
I wish I'd learned more about why he did it, which is one of the reasons I read about serial killers in the first place. What exactly drives a person to do such things?

(Picked up after author interview on NPR's Fresh Air.)

True crime is a difficult genre—too often, it tips into prurient interest. The Good Nurse generally manages to avoid that trap. Although a large section of the book is devoted to the crimes, the narrative is devoted to establishing the chain of events, rather than a gory retelling. (Thankfully, the crimes don't lend themselves to it.)

The real interest of the book is in how the investigators pieced together the crimes, and the way in which the system protected itself. Cullen was repeatedly terminated, and yet continued to get new jobs, killing more people. One hospital warned others off him, but failed to make any formal reports. I would have been interested to read even more on the systemic failures that lay behind the case—although I doubt any of the hospitals involved will ever provide the information to make that possible.

An excellent introduction to immunotherapy in the race to cure cancer. Easy to read, very accessible, and short in length.

The Good Nurse is a true crime novel based on Charlie Cullen's crimes in hospitals across New Jersey and Pennsylvania where he would eventually be dubbed "Angel of Death" for his actions. Cullen claims to only 40 deaths but experts believe he is responsible for taking upwards of 400 lives.

This book was written so well! I'm always a bit skeptical of true crime novels. Sometimes they can feel cheesy or there isn't enough research to back the story and all the reader has are the loose memories of those involved. In this book, Charles Graeber used court documents, police records, hospital records, and first-person accounts, including those of Charlie Cullen's. The reader learns about Charlie's upbringing, which I'll have to say helped to understand his driving actions but not why.

"Charlie felt rejected, humiliated. He was so much more being anonymous. There was power in that role. Anonymous could deny; anonymous could disappear. Anonymous was an unapologetic mystery, godlike in control."

We watch in despair as Charlie essentially overdoses countless defenseless patients and I just wanted to scream and pull him away. How did no one notice this happening? What about all of the missing drugs? Once we follow Charlie from his upbringing to his murderous career, the POV shifts to the police investigation. These chapters were particulary exciting. You can feel the desperation and time running out as they chase Charlie down.

I recommend this book to true crime lovers (duh) and to those who listen to the podcasts CaseFile and Dr. Death. Also for those intrigued by corporate corruption more specifically hospital corruption.

This is the sort of thing that scares me.

Humans, in general, are a dependent species. We depend on those who have uniforms, the police, the lawyers, the janitors, the waiters, the doctors and the nurses. We depend on these civil servants to help, clean, heal and protect us more than we’d like to admit, but generally we trust these people to do what we need them to do. When it comes to hospitals, we trust that the doctors and nurses are capable of healing us, of saving us, or at the very least, trying their absolute best not to let us slip away into death. We are taught from a young age that: “the doctor will make you better” and “the nice nurse-lady is just going to give you a quick shot, you won’t feel a thing”, so we trust these people blindly. Charles Cullen, a male nurse, fed off that trust from people and easily overstepped boundaries that should never be overstepped by medical professionals. By using insulin or digoxin (or any other available toxic medication) he played god and took the lives of so many people, that police officials can’t accurately place a number on the dead. It could be 300, it could be less, maybe more… who knows? Charles Cullen killed at random for sixteen years at nine different hospitals and although the hospitals suspected him of foul play, just sent him away with a tap on the wrist, hoping that someone else would sort out the problem. For fear of being sued, these hospitals didn’t call in the police and relied on internal investigations rather, which didn’t prove much of anything, and either asked Charles Cullen to quit – in which case he’d get a neutral reference – or he’d be fired. He almost always quit, of course, which meant he could go on and work at another hospital without being reprimanded.

The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness and Murder is a non-fiction book that would make you realise how easily it is for us to trust medical professionals in general, forgetting that these are still people with human flaws and their own urges. It shows us how one man that could have had it all – the wife, the kids, the house, the job, and even a dog or two – managed to lose everything because of the need to kill. Why did he do it? We may never know. But the fact is, Charles Cullen did kill people…

I thought that The Good Nurse was a very good book. It was well written, well researched and most importantly it showed us how easily we trust those with a uniform. Charles Cullen could have been stopped early in his career as a nurse/murderer, but the hospital didn’t want to deal with it and tarnish their good name, so he moved on and continued his killing somewhere else.

The only thing about Charles Graeber‘s The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness and Murder that I didn’t feel like there was enough of was an explanation of “the madness”. We have “the medicine” part done exceptionally well, “the murder” part is there lurking behind every corner, but I wanted to understand why Charles Cullen felt he needed to kill these innocent people – at random – or at least be given a bit more information about his mental disturbance. You can’t call a person a monster without actually giving the reader a reason for they’re demise (well, the murders may qualify as being monstrous acts, but there needs to be a reason for it, right?). That’s basically my only problem with this book…

It was a good read and it definitely made me wonder about the world of medicine, but sadly something lacked in the telling of Charles Cullen’s story. However, I would definitely advise non-fiction and true crime readers to get their hands on this book, because it is scary to think how easy these so-called Angels of Mercy are able to get away with their murders for so long without being caught.

(review originally posted on www.killeraphrodite.com)

There are a lot of exciting advances in medicine, but surely none are as exciting and game changing as cancer immunotherapy. (Perhaps I am a little biased though having seen these treatments in action). Immunotherapy is not chemotherapy, but utilises new research breakthroughs to help allow the immune system to see cancer as something foreign and fight it. Unfortunately, it won’t help every cancer (some look more like foreign monsters to the immune system, others look like something normal) but immunotherapy and future breakthroughs in the field are going to be talked about for a long time. This book is timely because cancer therapy is no longer cut, burn and poison (surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy). As I’ve heard one person tell another, ‘I’m not on chemotherapy, I’m on immunotherapy’. Soon they won’t even have to emphasise that word as immunotherapies are being used more and more in various cancers. It’s given life extending options to people with melanoma (a deadly form of skin cancer), kidney cancer and lung cancer. For some patients, questions have been more about if and when immunotherapy should be stopped rather than how long they are going to live. It is early days though and by no means is immunotherapy the cancer panacea for all cancers.

Charles Graeber mixes patient experiences with various cancers that have been changed by immunotherapy and detailing the history of immunotherapy from William Coley’s experiments with bacteria and sarcoma to the discovery of CTLA and PD-1/PD-L1. Like other ground-breaking research, cancer immunotherapy hasn’t always been the coolest kid on the block. Graeber explains in detail the many failures and tiny steps forward that occurred before the latest breakthrough. It makes for fascinating reading. He also explains how the immune system operates very well and simply. My knowledge on reading this book has become much more detailed and because of it, my interest in immunotherapy has skyrocketed. (Just ask anyone who has spoken to me recently– I’ve been talking about immunotherapy all week). If you don’t know anything about B cells and T cells, it might be worth a quick refresher via the internet before you jump in.

One of the problems with talking about a field that is moving forward in leaps and bounds is that further breakthroughs will occur during the writing. Most of the recent discussion in this book is about CTLA-4 and the drug that acts on it (ipilimumab). PD-1 and PD-L1 (nivolumab, pembrolizumab, durvalumab atezolizumab and avelumab) don’t get quite as much page time – maybe that should be the sequel?! CAR-T cells – or T cells engineered to target cancer cells also gets a nice summary too (important as this is going to be used more and more in Australia). But overall, this is a great book to whet your appetite for what’s happening in cancer therapies these days. It’s clearly written, has the human touch and explains the technology in a way the non-medical person can understand. Those in healthcare will find it just as interesting (plus there are many references to scientific papers to keep you very busy).

http://samstillreading.wordpress.com

Creepy. Well researched. Compulsively readable.

I THINK IT'S IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND WHY A REVIEWER READ THIS BOOK

Disclaimer: I am not aware that any relative, friend, acquaintance, nor myself has or is currently being treated for cancer. So, why did I read “Breakthrough” (BT)? An acquaintance recommended it very enthusiastically and he gave me a very brief description. I generally read crime fiction, history, and biographies. I had recommended a number of books to him, he read several, and had not recommended anything until T; I felt I owed him one. And on occasion I like to read something totally different to break the pattern and/or keep up with things.

I thought BT was OK, but not great. I felt I learned a good deal about immunotherapies, and other associated topics. One that was a bit unexpected and rather interesting was all the factors that are considered when allowing a patient to become part of a trial for a new drug. I also noted some occasional nuggets of information like all the layers of immune protection we have surrounding and protecting us if laid end-to-end could cover a doubles tennis court. There were some interesting case histories, some with happy endings and some with sad ones including some that seemed to be on the pathway to a successful treatment, only to suddenly do a 180. The book is relatively brief, only 193 pages of text spread over nine chapters. There are also three appendices; I read only one of them but it turned out to be only a summary of the main points made earlier and there was nothing new there for me.

In the acknowledgments, the author writes: “This book was made possible in part by the vision and generosity of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.” I’m not sure exactly what that meant. I note that the author, Charles Graeber, is not an M.D. He is the author of a true-crime book, “The Good Nurse” for which he received an Edgar Award nomination. I thought the writing in BT was good; I understood most of the process as described but I don’t think I could repeat it in any detail nor answer questions about it. Maybe more detail would have helped. I wish there were more dates for various incidents and milestones – most of the writing was in chronological order but I got tripped up once or twice when it wasn’t. I would not recommend this book unless someone had a very specific interest in the subject and then only with the caveats above.

My expectations were far too high. There's very little detail on the science or background on the scientists. Graeber basically admits this, and tries to excuse it by saying that science is a team effort and you can't honestly credit just one person for any major discovery. That's true, but it's a cop-out. I didn't expect a profile of every single scientist involved, but an interesting selection of scientists—even just one or two—would have made the book much better.

Instead of people interested in the science, its development and progress, Graeber seems to have targeted his book at cancer patients and patient advocates. So we get minimal details on the science—little more than you'd already know from magazine articles—we get several unedited, poorly researched appendices on the science. And this is thrown in with supposedly inspirational stories about cancer survivors. It doesn't work well.

The subject matter is crazy interesting but I found this book frustrating in so many ways. Two or three words could have been cut out of every sentence. It felt like Graeber was writing the same thing over and over, but it wasn't the right thing to repeat, you know? I really would have liked to know more about why Cullen did this and what makes him so different from other "Angel of Death" killers. There was a lot of good information in the book but not a lot of analysis. The main takeaway from this book for me is that Amy Loughren is an actual badass. CI Amy can GET IT.

I've given this 5***** but that's not to suggest that it's a book for the average reader. It does tend toward "teckiness" so you're going to have to give it some very careful reading. It can also be a bit cumbersome because there are extensive and very substantive endnotes that really should be read but that will require an amount of flipping back and forth. But it is a book for the lay reader, so you don't need an M.D. or a Ph.D. to understand it. And the author does combine "tecky" discussion with human interest stories.

If you don't have a personal interest/involvement in this subject, this is a book you might want to pass on. And if you do have a particular interest and read it, be prepared to do it slowly and to reread it later on. Get a general grasp of the subject and then put it aside to come back to later as a reference when you have an actual need for some specific information.

For a somewhat more basic read, go to the 100 Questions and Answers About.... series and check out the particular cancer you're concerned about. (There are numerous books in this series, and cancer's only a subset of the topics covered; make sure you check all half-dozen or so pages of book listings.) After you've gotten a more general introduction, then you might want to turn to The Breakthrough for more specific discussion of immunotherapy. And realize that the current level of available immunotherapy treatments seems to be limited to certain particular cancers, or at least to be more effective with some cancers than others.

Digital audiobook read by Will Collyer

Subtitle: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

Charles Cullen was a registered nurse who worked in a number of New Jersey hospitals. He always volunteered to care for the sickest patients and was a seemingly dedicated nurse. But people began to notice that wherever Charlie worked, the death rates skyrocketed. When he was finally arrested, he was quickly dubbed “The Angel of Death.”

Graeber conducted many interviews, including with Cullen and with the friend and colleague who eventually cooperated with police to capture him. It’s a fascinating story and points out flaws in the administration of drugs in hospitals … at least in the early 2000s. My own experiences in more recent years shows a vigilance that was not apparent in Graeber’s account.

I really applaud the efforts of nurse Amy Loughren. It was she who put the pieces together and who took the time to study records of drug use in the hospital to discover the patterns that pointed to Cullen’s guilt. Her courage and tenacity as a police confidential informant was instrumental in Cullen’s conviction.

I’ve always been interested in medicine, and I love the true crime genre, though I don’t read much of it these days. This didn’t quite capture my attention the way other true crime works have done. It was interesting and Graeber clearly did his homework, but it wasn’t very compelling.

Will Collyer did a fine job reading the audio book. He has good pacing and clear diction.

This was an interesting read. I'd watched a documentary about nurses who kill previously and thought this would have been a good follow up considering the nurse was rather prolific. It is astounding he managed to get away with it for so long and the role bureaucracy played. I would have enjoyed reading more of the psychology behind this type of crime in the book, but discussion was more on the acts themselves and piecing together the timeline of events through the years. Still, an engaging read.

Quite good and informative. Amazing, actually!
It made me thankful that I survived my hospital stays!

Adrianne½

Not as medically informative nor as accurate as I'd hoped, but the story was interesting enough. The writing is not amazing.

And the 'madness' is not explained. Afterwards, they called him the 'Angel Of Death' but that implies compassion, of which there was no evidence.

Having suffered withdrawal symptoms after bingeing on 'Making of a Murderer' on Netflix, I decided to get another shot of true crime with 'The Good Nurse'. It's a fascinating and horrific story about possibly America's most prolific serial killer (we don't know for sure how many patients he killed but it could be up to 400).
It's written in the style of a novel which I usually find quite effective (especially in the hands of a master like Hampton Sides). But Charles Graeber tends to over-write at times and his use of extended stilted dialogue came across more as irritating than authentic. Graeber gives us a detailed study of Charles Cullen (The Good Nurse of the title) and covers his murderous career in almost too much detail. The book comes alive in the final third where we finally get to the police investigation. However, the huge question of how he was allowed to get away with it for so long and why none of the hospitals he worked in carried out proper investigations is never answered mainly because Graeber wasn't able to talk to any of the hospital authorities involved. In the end, they all made undisclosed out-of-court settlements with the victims' relatives and it was all hushed up.

This was an okay book. I finished it. But I didn't feel like I really understood the killer or his motives any better than when I started it. And what's with all the footnotes? This left me with more questions than answers.