Strong Medicine (novel)

Strong Medicine

Front cover
Author	Arthur Hailey
Language	English
Publisher	Doubleday
Publication date	1984
ISBN
OCLC	13117701

Strong Medicine is a 1984 novel by Arthur Hailey.

The book begins with two of the chief characters, Celia Jordan and her husband, on a flight home to the US anticipating trouble that the reader is not yet fully in on, involving a certain Senator Donahue. The action then goes back some 40 years to when Celia, unmarried, was a drug sales rep for a pharmaceutical company and her husband-to-be an internist beginning his career at a New Jersey hospital. Andrew Jordan is perplexed with the case of a young woman dying from hepatitis A, not a usually fatal infection, that she acquired on a cheap holiday in Mexico. Celia happens to know that her company is researching a drug that would combat the woman's symptoms, and manages to get through the protocols to find some, and as a last desperate measure, the drug is administered and the woman's life is saved. The next morning, she and Andrew Jordan become engaged, largely, it appears, on a whim of Celia's.

Celia turns out to be someone who knows what she wants and gets it, and we soon learn the story of how she came to be in her present selling position, where she has made a name for herself by going out of her way to become more knowledgeable about her job, and, after one particularly bruising encounter, earn the respect rather than the ridicule of practising doctors.

On their honeymoon the two share their various family histories, Andrew's mother and father having separated and left him to the care of an aunt who has sacrificed all she has to get him to where he is, and Celia's father having died in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

On return from work, Celia is engaged to speak at the annual company conference, and is planning a major assault on what she sees as the lack of training and sharp practice that are rife among her own company. Her manager Sam Hawthorne strongly advises against this, but when Celia delivers her speech anyway, to the dismay of her company bosses, she is close to being fired when Sam intervenes to save her. She is soon promoted to a new position and then begins to rise through the company at the same time as starting a family. She is a woman who is determined to have the best of both worlds at work and at home, and manages to somehow fit it all in. By this time she has two children: Lisa, who appears to inherit much of her organisational sense, and Bruce, a history fanatic. Strains in the Jordans' marriage surface on a trip to Ecuador where both acknowledge they have let their standards slip, Andrew having spent many years covering for his chief at the hospital, who is a closet drug addict, and due to which at least one patient has died in preventable circumstances.