Medical Biography

Carolyn Jourdan spent many years as a congressional lawyer in Washington, D.C. Then she was called home to fill in for her mother as receptionist at her father's rural Tennessee doctor's office - assured it would only be for a few days.

As one of America’s most celebrated vascular surgeons, Dr. Frank Veith’s career was anything but conventional—from working undercover with the CIA to fighting to make vascular surgery an independent specialty to creating the largest vascular conference in the world.

“Proceed as the way opens” is how William Least Heat-Moon put it in his book, River Horse. The line becomes a sort of mantra for Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth McGowan, a melanoma survivor. Having been given a five-year clean bill of health, McGowan decides to bicycle all 4,000 or so miles from America’s West to East Coast. She wants to help other melanoma victims and sets out to use her many miles to raise funds for cancer research. She also wants to better understand her late father, who died of melanoma at the age of 44, when Elizabeth was just 15.

Grada was only 17 years old when she met her soulmate, Peter. By 19 she was married and had migrated from Holland to live in Peter’s homeland, Tasmania, Australia. Grada lived her dream - homesteading at the "back of beyond" with the love of her life, six children, and a menagerie of farm animals. In 2000 she and Peter opened a wellness clinic in their back yard. At the pinnacle of her life, Grada was hit by a truck - literally. During the near-death experience that followed, Grada had to make the decision to return to her body.

From the number one best-selling author of The Cause of Death comes an audiobook about the unlikely, extraordinary, obscure and often tragic ways humans meet their demise. A dead body without a trace of trauma; alien parasites; worms of the brain; crocodile attacks and bizarre eating disorders....In The Quick and the Dead, pathologist and self-confessed death-aficionado Dr. Cynric Temple-Camp takes listeners into a world of disease and death as he seeks answers for those who were unlucky, and those still alive to tell the tale.

People love and remember the novels of Bobbie Ann Mason because they ring so true. This dazzling memoir has the same power. In it, Mason tells the story of her own family - a multilayered saga of three generations, their aspirations, their conflicts, and the ties that bound them to one another.

“Why do they keep locking me up?” Rusty’s Story is Carol Gino’s account of the extraordinary life of the woman she undertook to help - the woman who ended up teaching her an invaluable lesson about the will to live, the strength of hope...

Rock Doc will take you from backstage at a Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon concert in the early '70s, where Neil's production company, Circus Talents, Ltd., was providing production services, to the office operating rooms of elite New York surgeons where Neil Ratner, MD, was director of anesthesia.

Shortly after his daughter, Leontine, was born, Christian Donlan's world shifted an inch to the left. He started to miss light switches and door handles when reaching for them. He would injure himself in a hundred stupid ways every day. First playful and then maddening, these strange experiences were the early symptoms of multiple sclerosis, an incurable and degenerative neurological disease.

Charity Tillemann-Dick was a vivacious young American soprano studying at the celebrated Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest when she received devastating news: her lungs were failing, her heart was three and a half sizes too big, and she would die within five years. Inexplicably, despite her fatal pulmonary condition, she could still sing. Medical experts advised Charity to abandon her musical dreams, but if her time was running out, she wanted to spend it doing what she loved.

Wondering Who You Are braids the story of Sonya and Richard's relationship and those memories he could no longer conjure together with his fateful days in the hospital and through a marriage no longer grounded on decades of shared experience.

This is Nadina LaSpina's story - from her early years in her native Sicily, where she contracts polio as a baby, a fact that makes her the object of well-meaning pity and the target of messages of hopelessness, to her adolescence and youth in America, spent almost entirely in hospitals where she is tortured in the quest for a cure and made to feel that her body no longer belongs to her, and to her rebellion and her activism in the disability-rights movement.

Spontaneous combustion and exhumation, drug mules and devil worshippers, a gruesome killing beneath the Palmerston North Airport control tower, a mysterious death in a historic homestead, a firsthand dissection of the infamous Mark Lundy case... In The Cause of Death, provincial pathologist Dr. Cynric Temple-Camp lifts the lid on the most unusual stories of death and murder he's encountered during his 30-year career.

Meet Doctor Ben MacFarlane - a very modern flying doctor. His job is get on a plane and bring patients home after holiday disasters, gap year crises, embarrassing incidents on business trips and all the other things that can go wrong when we head overseas. Holiday SOS is his extraordinary story. It’s a unique medical memoir of the people he helps - and a year in the life of one of the world’s most frequent flyers!

"Nur sprechenden Menschen kann geholfen werden" sagte Marion Glück als Marineoffizier zu ihren Soldaten. Doch sie selbst traute sich nicht mit anderen über ihre Probleme zu sprechen. Als sie sich doch überwand, wurde sie als Hypochonder belächelt und abgestempelt. Trotz großer Familie und engem Freundeskreis, fühlte sich die Autorin jahrelang unglücklich und einsam. Mobbing, Depressionen und Suizidgedanken bestimmten ihr Leben. In diesem Buch erzählt die Autorin ihre Geschichte.

A Restored Life is Kyle Walker’s latest book of inspiration and healing over type-two diabetes. It is a story of success over Lyme disease, despite repeated misdiagnoses. Kyle shares his stories of struggle and of success, those of faith, poetry, his dogs, and of course family, those that helped get him through.

Trauma and Tenacity in Vietnam: A Surgeon's Story captures the defining period in the medical life of Capt. Sheldon Kushner, MD, while stationed in Vinh Long, Vietnam, from 1968-69. Through letters, reel-to-reel tape recordings, slides, and the personal interviews that recounted his experience, the story of a young surgeon is revealed.

BBC Breakfast's Dr Rosemary Leonard shares more incredible stories from her career as a GP. 'I'm in the wrong job,' I said to our practice nurse, 'I should definitely have been a detective.' For Dr Rosemary Leonard, a day in her GP's surgery is full of unexplained ailments and mysteries to be solved. From questions of paternity to apparently drug-resistant symptoms, these mysteries can sometimes take a while to get to the bottom of, especially when they are of a more intimate nature.

Most sixteen year-old kids joyride in Daddy's pickup. Not Brian Thomas. Instead, you find him out buzzing the football team in Daddy's airplane. Flying is his life - it's in his blood. Both of his parents are pilots. His older brother is in the Air Force. And he can't imagine himself as anything but an aviator. That is, until the bleeding disorder he's battled since he was two years old sidelines him.

Åtta år efter karriärens slut diagnostiserades Klas Ingesson med en benmärgscancer som han redan från första dagen visste skulle bli hans död. Det är bara lite cancer. Om livet, döden och myten om mig själv är Klas Ingessons självbiografi och testamente, som han arbetade med ända fram till sin död den 29 oktober 2014. I boken berättar Klas ärligt och naket om ett fotbollsliv på toppnivå, men också om den sista matchen i hans liv - och hur den gav honom ett nytt svar på frågan om vad det innebär att alltid göra sitt bästa.