Discolored book jacket Pages starting to yellow with age Coward McCann, Inc, 1968 book club edition, 383 pages The Hatch Clinic is privately owned by a spectacularly successful surgeon, Matthew Hatch, who has pressured his staff specialists into prescribing surgery for almost all their patients-a radical last report that is also, for the doctor, the most profitable. When Dr. Peter de Haan, a young and handsome GP, comes to the clinic on his first medical assignment, he is horrified by what he sees. Far from being a superb technician, Matthew Hatch is revealed as a clumsy, arrogant butcher, whose patients develop alarming postoperative complications which invariably prove fatal.