Medical

In this inspiring book, Dr. Rolle tells the story of his incredible journey, revealing how a strong work ethic, deep faith, and the family values instilled by his Bahamian immigrant parents set the stage for the transformative life philosophy that enabled him to overcome adversity....

One morning in late 2017, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni woke up with strangely blurred vision. He wondered at first if some goo or gunk had worked its way into his right eye. But this was no fleeting annoyance, no fixable inconvenience....

A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to reentry into “normal” life....

At the age of 36, on the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer....

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells - taken without her knowledge - became one of the most important tools in medicine....

In the tradition of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone and shows such as In Treatment, a riveting look behind the closed door of the therapist's office....

The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with 12 children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease....

A Harvard-trained neurosurgeon's minute-by-minute account of his own near-death experience - and what he discovered in the heavenly realm beyond life.....

A prize-winning journalist with a background in neuroscience, Helen Thomson spent years tracking down people who live with the world's most extraordinary neurological disorders - like a man who tried to break his back because his legs no longer felt like his own....

The darkly funny memoir of Sarah Ramey’s years-long battle with a mysterious illness that doctors thought was all in her head - but wasn’t. A revelation and an inspiration for millions of women whose legitimate health complaints are ignored....

At the age of 22, Jennifer Worth left her comfortable home to move into a convent and become a midwife in postwar London’s East End slums....

Karl Deisseroth has spent his life pursuing truths about the human mind, both as a renowned clinical psychiatrist and as a researcher creating and developing the revolutionary field of optogenetics, which uses light to help decipher the brain’s workings....

Kate Bowler is a professor at Duke Divinity School with a modest Christian upbringing, but she specializes in the study of the prosperity gospel, a creed that sees fortune as a blessing from God and misfortune as a mark of God's disapproval....

In My Stroke of Insight, Taylor shares her perspective on the brain and its capacity for recovery, and the sense of omniscient understanding she gained from this inspiring voyage....

When 24-year-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a hospital room, strapped to her bed and unable to move or speak, she had no memory of how she’d gotten there. Days earlier, she had been on the threshold of a new, adult life....

With poignant insight and humor, Frank Vertosick, Jr., MD, describes some of the greatest challenges of his career, including a six-week-old infant with a tumor in her brain and more....

Kidder tells the true story of a socially conscious genius who uses his intellectual and personal gifts to solve global health problems.

Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights, and missed weekends, comedian and former medical resident Adam Kay’s This Is Going to Hurt provides a no-holds-barred account of his time on the front lines of medicine....

You've never listened to a book like The Reason I Jump....

In Letters to a Young Therapist, Dr. Pipher shares what she has learned in 30 years as a therapist, helping warring families, alienated adolescents, and harried professionals restore peace and beauty to their lives....

James Herriot is one of the most beloved storytellers of our time, a writer whose rich and unique literary gifts are matched by an exuberant gift for celebrating existence...

Twenty-two-year-old Jennifer Worth, from a comfortable middle-class upbringing, went to work as a midwife in the poorest section of postwar London....

A brilliant and courageous doctor reveals, in gripping accounts of true cases, the power and limits of modern medicine....

In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of 19th-century surgery on the eve of profound transformation....

A lyrical, poignant memoir by a young woman about her childhood battle with debilitating obsessive compulsive disorder, and her hard-won journey to recovery....

In this inspiring book, Dr. Rolle tells the story of his incredible journey, revealing how a strong work ethic, deep faith, and the family values instilled by his Bahamian immigrant parents set the stage for the transformative life philosophy that enabled him to overcome adversity, defy expectations, and create a life of meaning and purpose.

Anna Kent has delivered babies in war zones, caring for the most vulnerable women in the most vulnerable places in the world. At 26 years old, not yet a fully trained midwife, she delivered a baby in a tropical storm by the light of a headtorch; the following year, she would be responsible for the female health of 30,000 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. But returning to the UK to work for the NHS, she soon learned that even at home the right to a safe birth was impossible to take for granted.

On the morning of October 21, 1966, Kathleen Middleton, a music teacher in suburban London, awoke choking and gasping, convinced disaster was about to strike. An hour later, a mountain of rubble containing waste from a coal mine collapsed above the village of Aberfan, swamping buildings and killing 144 people, many of them children. Among the doctors and emergency workers who arrived on the scene was John Barker, a psychiatrist from Shelton Hospital, in Shrewsbury.

Today he is known as Dr. Q, an internationally renowned neurosurgeon and neuroscientist who leads cutting-edge research to cure brain cancer. But not too long ago, he was Freddy, a 19-year-old undocumented migrant worker toiling in the fields of Central California. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa tells his amazing life story - from his impoverished childhood in the tiny village of Palaco, Mexico, to his harrowing border crossing and his transformation from illegal immigrant to American citizen and gifted student at the University of California at Berkeley and at Harvard Medical School. 

Narrated by the author, Diane Wilson shares her journey through random and sometimes humorous events of having an invisible illness, how her brain kept this injury even from herself, the loss of focus and sense of self, an obsession with day trading retirement funds, and the alternative therapies that helped heal her brain—a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh, acupuncture, learning to sing, and, most centrally, neurofeedback.

Just when life seemed rosy and the sun was shining, Dr. Bhaskar Bora sustained a severe spinal cord injury in July 2019 following an operation, which left him with paralysis of both legs, a nonfunctioning right hand, and a long stay in the hospital, eventually leading to a forced medical retirement from his medical career and a wheelchair in place of a sports car. Poorer financially but richer in experiences of life, he is now a voice for the disabled and has written the book The Second Chance in Life as an honest reflection of his life experiences.

Helena Rho was six years old when her family left Seoul, Korea, for America and its opportunities. Years later, her Korean-ness behind her, Helena had everything a model minority was supposed to want: she was married to a white American doctor and had a beautiful home, two children, and a career as an assistant professor of pediatrics. For decades she fulfilled the expectations of others. All the while Helena kept silent about the traumas - both professional and personal - that left her anxious yet determined to escape.

“Ten years after a car accident paralyzed my legs, a pressure sore infection escalated into a life-or-death scenario requiring emergency surgery, followed by an extended recovery in a nursing home. For weeks, I was confined to a special medical bed, where I was not allowed to sit up, but required to remain on my back 24/7. This is the story of my search for peace and sanity during that claustrophobic confinement, which subsequently led to a deeper understanding and alignment of my internal, eternal well-being". (Author Ashley Lyn Olson).

Just after COVID arrived in North America, journalist Helen Epstein was diagnosed with endometrial cancer—one of a predicted 66,570 new cases of cancer of the uterine body in the United States in 2021. About 600,000 American women have had it. A candid and eye-opening account of a medical steeplechase of surgery, chemo, and radiation therapy, Getting Through It brings together reporting, research, and elements of memoir to tell an important story. A guide for other women, their caregivers, and their families.

Former Newcastle United winger Paul Ferris was 51. He had successfully forged a post-football career as a physio, barrister and then a CEO, and his award-winning memoir, The Boy on the Shed, was just about to be published. But then he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. This honest, sometimes brutal and frequently funny book tells the story of what happened next.

As a nurse for nearly 50 years, Keith Cox provided expert care and comfort to countless people facing the unimaginable. With insight and sensitivity, A Caring Life takes us behind the scenes of his remarkable nursing career and the moving stories of hope, determination and loss that underpinned it. Along the way, he shares lessons gained from a career spent confronting mortality, from finding joy in difficult circumstances to understanding that true strength comes in thinking of others and being part of a community.

As the effects of the war raging in Europe begins to be felt at home in London, Monica Dickens decides to do her bit and to pursue a new career and so enrols as a student nurse at a hospital. By nature clever and spirited, she struggles to submit to the iron rule of the Matron and Sisters and is alternately infuriated and charmed by her patients. That's not to mention the mountains of menial work that are a trainee's lot. But there are friends among the staff and patients, night-time escapades to dances with dashing army men and her secret writing project to keep her going.

In What We Wish Were True, Quinn achingly grapples with the possibility of leaving behind the husband and children she adores, and what it means to live with a terminal diagnosis and still find meaning. “I think about how my purpose may be the same in death as it continues to be in life—surrendering to the hope that our weaknesses can be made strong, that what is broken can be made whole,” she writes.

In The Song of Our Scars, physician Haider Warraich offers a bold reexamination of the nature of pain, not as a simple physical sensation, but as a cultural experience. Warraich, himself a sufferer of chronic pain, considers the ways our notions of pain have been shaped not just by science but by politics and power, by whose suffering mattered and whose didn’t.