Mars Hospital: A Doctor’s Novel

In this rollicking dark comedy about a failing hospital in Mars, Nebraska, Dr. Wave, a kind and well-meaning outsider, leaps into a year-long fight against an overwhelming bureaucracy upheld by a corrupt administrator who refuses to budge. Wave juggles some of the worst (and silliest) medical cases of his career and struggles to manage a hostile coterie of MDs with a host of defects, the least of which is their ubiquitous lack of Medical Board certifications, while doing his best to stay professional in the face of converging forces that seem hell-bent on undoing his easy solutions to obvious problems. Meanwhile, Skip, the hospital’s CEO who dances his way out of every argument, seems interested in spending money only on kooky business development programming. After being denied help at every turn, Wave is pushed to the limit of his good nature. Will he be able to save Mars Hospital, or will he be forced to give up and seek greener pastures? Mars Hospital is drawn from the experiences of Dr. Lloyd Flatt, a veteran family physician who has seen far more in his career than he could ever dream (or ever wanted to).

Dr. Lloyd M. Flatt obtained his M.D. at Loyola University in 1992 and completed an internship and residency at Loyola University in Internal Medicine in 1995. He entered general medical practice full time in 1996 and became medical director of a small rural hospital in Illinois in 1998. He worked clinically and as a medical director until 2019, when he retired to live in Las Vegas and write his first book Mars Hospital.