Medical Biography

Around the clock, across the country, these highly skilled and compassionate men and women sacrifice and struggle for us and our families. You have never heard their true stories. Not like this. From big-city and small-town hospitals. From behind the scenes. From the heart. This book will make you laugh, make you cry, make you understand.

Based on exclusive and unrestricted access to more than 5,000 pages of personal writings and family photos, this definitive biography of German physician and SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Josef Mengele (1911-1979) probes the personality and motivations of Auschwitz's "Angel of Death". From May 1943 through January 1945, Mengele selected who would be gassed immediately, who would be worked to death, and who would serve as involuntary guinea pigs for his spurious and ghastly human experiments (twins were Mengele's particular obsession).

In her harrowing, defiant, and unforgettable memoir, Sarah Ramey recounts the decade-long saga of how a seemingly minor illness in her senior year of college turned into a prolonged and elusive condition that destroyed her health but that doctors couldn't diagnose or treat. Worse, as they failed to cure her, they hinted that her devastating symptoms were psychological. The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness is a memoir with a mission: to help the millions of (mostly) women who suffer from unnamed or misunderstood conditions.

Lynda Van Devanter was the girl next door, the cheerleader who went to Catholic schools, enjoyed sports, and got along well with her four sisters and parents. After high school she attended nursing school and then did something that would shatter her secure world for the rest of her life: in 1969, she joined the army and was shipped to Vietnam. When she arrived in Vietnam her idealistic view of the war vanished quickly. She worked long hours in cramped, ill-equipped, understaffed operating rooms. She saw friends die.

My career as a firefighter/paramedic stretched from 1974 to 2000 when were inventing EMS as we went along. These are stories from those years on the street. That place I named so long ago, the other reality that exists just outside most people’s everyday lives. It is a place that seems to exist parallel to the normal workaday existence: yet it is only a car accident or cardiac away for any of us. It manifested itself in brushfires, house fires, shootings, stabbings, hangings, accidents with injuries, cardiacs, codes, drownings, and a thousand other emergencies.

A political journalist and activist, Cousins was also a professor of medical humanities at UCLA, where he studied the biochemistry of human emotions and their relationship to healing. When Cousins was hospitalized with a debilitating collagen illness, he decided to take his health into his own hands. Cousins and his doctor combated the disease together by creating a regimen of laughter and vitamin C specifically calibrated to his needs. Against all odds, the treatment worked, proving to Cousins that a positive attitude was key to his improvement.

In medical school, Paul Farmer found his life’s calling: to cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. Tracy Kidder’s magnificent account shows how one person can make a difference in solving global health problems through a clear-eyed understanding of the interaction of politics, wealth, social systems, and disease. Profound, Mountains Beyond Mountains takes us from Harvard to Haiti, Peru, Cuba, and Russia as Farmer changes people’s minds through his dedication to the philosophy that “the only real nation is humanity.”

From Darkness to Sight chronicles the remarkable life journey of Dr. Ming Wang, a world-renowned laser eye surgeon and philanthropist. As a teenager, Ming fought valiantly to escape one of history’s darkest eras - China’s Cultural Revolution - during which millions of innocent youth were deported to remote areas to face a life sentence of poverty and hard labor. Through his own tenacity and his parents’ tireless efforts to provide a chance of freedom for their son, Ming eventually made his way to America with $50 in his pocket and an American dream in his heart.

Now settled into the sleepy Yorkshire village of Darrowby, and married to Helen the farmer’s daughter, James Herriot thinks he’s finally got himself sorted. But life as a vet in the 1930s was never going to be easy. Quite aside from his unpredictable colleagues, brothers Siegfried and Tristan Farnon, he must contend with new-fangled medical techniques, delivering calves after far too much homemade wine, and a grudge-holding dog called Magnus who never forgets.

The story of two outsiders and obsessives whose collision prompted an evangelistic alliance on the furthest frontiers of underground music. Steve Davis first met Kavus Torabi - guitarist with Gong, Guapo, Cardiacs and Knifeworld - in the mid-2000s at a gig by French underground rock legends Magma. Over the next few years, this unlikely duo's shared affinity for visionary psychedelic music would become the foundation of not only a firm friendship, but also the most infectiously inclusive broadcasting style since the much-mourned death of John Peel.

Tired of the pace and noise of life near London and longing for a better place to raise their young children, Mary J. MacLeod and her husband, George, encountered their dream while vacationing on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides. Enthralled by its windswept beauty, they soon were the proud and startled owners of a near-derelict croft house - a farmer’s stone cottage - on “a small acre” of land. Mary assumed duties as the island’s district nurse.

Dans ce livre inspirant, Anita Moorjani raconte comment, après avoir lutté contre le cancer durant presque quatre ans, son organisme, envahi par les cellules malignes, s'est mis à défaillir. Lorsque ses organes ont cessé de fonctionner, Anita a vécu une expérience de mort imminente extraordinaire, au cours de laquelle elle a compris sa valeur intrinsèque et la véritable cause de sa maladie. En reprenant conscience, elle a constaté que son état s'était amélioré tellement vite qu'elle a pu sortir de l'hôpital après quelques semaines et sans trace de cancer dans son corps !

Cory Friedman woke up one morning when he was five years old with the uncontrollable urge to twitch his neck. From that day forward his life became a hell of irrepressible tics and involuntary utterances, and Cory embarked on an excruciating journey from specialist to specialist to discover the cause of his disease. Soon it became unclear what tics were symptoms of his disease and what were side effects of the countless combinations of drugs. The only certainty is that it kept getting worse. Simply put: Cory Friedman's life was a living hell.

In this follow-up to the hugely popular Angels in the ER, Dr. Robert D. Lesslie shares more of his life-changing emergency-room encounters with nurses, doctors, patients, friends, and strangers who’ve served as God’s hands in the direst of circumstances. You’ll be deeply moved by these tales of both triumph and tragedy from the ER front line, as well as by the profound faith that has sustained Dr. Lesslie for more than 30 years on the job.

In Strangers to Ourselves, a powerful and gripping debut, Rachel Aviv raises fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. Aviv asks how the stories we tell about mental disorders shape their course in our lives. Challenging the way we understand and talk about illness, her account is a testament to the porousness and resilience of the mind.

Eva Hagberg Fisher spent her lonely youth looking everywhere for connection: drugs, alcohol, therapists, boyfriends, girlfriends. Sometimes she found it, but always temporarily. Then, at age 30, an undiscovered mass in her brain ruptured. So did her life. A brain surgery marked only the beginning of a long journey, and when her illness hit a critical stage, it forced her to finally admit the long suppressed truth: she was vulnerable, she needed help, and she longed to grow. She needed true friendship for the first time.

Heart disease is the number-one killer in the world. Despite ever-advancing medical procedures and more powerful pharmaceutical drugs, the rate of heart disease continues to rise. According to Dr. Stephen Hussey, this is due in part to misunderstandings about how the heart really functions and how to keep it healthy. These misunderstandings result in improper medical approaches and off-target intervention therapies.

Over the next ten years, 40 to 60 million people in this country will be admitted to the ICU. Most of these hospitalizations will be sudden, unexpected, and harrowing experiences that can alter patients and their families physically and emotionally, with effects that endure for years. In this rich blend of science, medical history, profoundly humane patient stories, and personal reflection, Dr. Wes Ely describes his mission to prevent patients from being inadvertently harmed by the technology that is keeping them alive.

En France, on tue tous les jours, toutes les heures. Les faits divers envahissent les journaux, les séries télévisées de médecine légale prolifèrent, les histoires criminelles, réelles ou fictives, exercent sur le public une fascination sans borne. Michel Sapanet est médecin légiste. Sa vie, c'est la mort. Sur sa table en inox, avec un immense respect, il pratique son autopsie: exploration des boîtes crâniennes, inspection des chairs meurtries, ouverture des cœurs. Égorgés, poignardés, étranglés, pendus, tués par balle, toutes les victimes finissent par parler.

In 1992, Marilyn French was told she had one year to live. A smoker of 48 years she was diagnosed as having cancer of the oesophagus, a cancer which is almost always fatal. Five years on, having battled with chemotherapy and radiotherapy, a heart attack and her back breaking, she is very much alive. And - astonishingly - her body shows no sign of cancer.