Like Hailey's Airport (1968), Strong Medicine has some affinities with the muckraking tradition exemplified by Upton Sinclair, whose best-selling novel The Jungle (1906) was a welldocumented attack on the meat-packing industry in Chicago. Also, Sinclair Lewis relied on careful and detailed research to satirize the medical profession in Arrowsmith (1925) and subsequently wrote penetrating fictional analyses of such fields as organized religion, big business, social welfare and hotel management. More recently, Joseph Wambaugh has drawn on personal experience to create gripping stories about police work in the modern city in novels such as The New Centurions (1971). Unlike these writers, however, Hailey is less interested in presenting thought-provoking and realistic images of American society than in offering his readers a few hours of entertainment and information.