Although by genre Charles Graeber's The Good Nurse is non-fiction, it reads more like a fictional thriller. It tells the story of a nurse named Charles Cullen, perhaps the most prolific serial killer in history, having likely killed nearly 400 people. But Cullen, who was a nurse for many years, was a seemingly normal man. He was intelligent man who doted on his wife and his children. He was, in the eyes of many, a good nurse and a good man. The Good Nurse tells Cullen's story from childhood to his eventual trial and imprisonment and tells the story of his victims.
In his day job, Charles Graeber is a journalist. He brought his skills as a journalist to the research and writing of The Good Nurse, which he said took him quite a few years so that he could nail down the facts of the story. Graeber very consistently met with Cullen, who he found very forthcoming. But Graeber also wanted to sure that he heard the story from several sources so that readers could decide for themselves about Cullen, the medical field, and those related to both.
Interestingly, Cullen was caught several times in his career, first at St. Barabas and then at St. Luke's. In an interview Graeber conducted with 60 Minutes, he said that "There's no reason that I should have been a practicing nurse at that point [after getting caught].” But Cullen left each job with good job references and with many people still liking him. Graeber includes this point in the novel to show how corrupt, ineffective, and enabling the medical system is for inept, dangerous, and/or violent medical professionals.
In fact, Graeber exposes that hospitals were often more concerned with the potential legal repercussions associated with not giving out a good reference to bad and dangerous employees than they were with the safety of their patients. In doing so, they enabled the bad behavior of doctors (or nurses like Cullen) who took joy in killing their patients. At the core of this is a profound irony: medical professionals are supposed to do no harm. But because they enabled such poor behavior, they did tremendous harm.
In what is a searing indictment of the medical establishment and Cullen himself, The Good Nurse is a view into the mind of an evil but complex man. It is also a look into, and oftentimes a searing indictment of, the medical field and the people who work within it.
