Hospital Days: A Memoir

Hospital Days offers a riveting exploration of life in America's hospitals during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s. Striking in its candor and vibrant in its nuances, Hudson Owen offers one of the most poignant medical memoirs of our generation.

Jacob M. Appel MD JD



During the late Sixties, I worked in a number of hospitals as an aide or orderly. Two of them were world famous: McLean Hospital, Belmont, Massachusetts; and the Massachusetts General Hospital, in downtown Boston. Two were in Toronto. They were my first full time jobs.



I saw incredible things, people and incidents that have stayed with me all these years: the managed blood of surgery, the chaos of emergency, tense moments in a mental ward.



These are human-interest stories, with a smattering of medical terms, where appropriate. It’s about what happened in the hospital and outside the hospital during a turbulent period in history. I learned about life and death in hospitals, which has tempered my understanding of the world ever since. Approximately 17,000 words. I am a published poet and author, produced playwright in New York City, digital artist, and wilderness canoeist.