Medical Biography

As one of the world's leading brain surgeons, Dr Jandial is the last hope for many patients who have extreme forms of cancer - patients who can't be saved, but deserve more time. Life on a Knife's Edge is his account of the resilience, courage and belief he has witnessed in his patients, and the lessons he has learned from them.

A doctor’s powerful and deeply human memoir about the mysteries of the brain and his 40-year quest to find a treatment for multiple sclerosis.

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.

After knowing friends with anorexia and being baffled by their behavior, Laura Moisin suddenly found herself prone to the same disease - not eating at all and going weeks at a time consuming nothing but water and the occasional black coffee. Deceiving therapists by misleading them with symptoms of depression, her anorexia is prolonged, and her health deteriorates rapidly.

In this transporting book, David Oliver Relin shines a light on the work of Geoffrey Tabin and Sanduk Ruit, gifted ophthalmologists who have dedicated their lives to restoring sight to some of the world’s most isolated, impoverished people through the Himalayan Cataract Project, an organization they founded in 1995. Tabin was the high-achieving bad boy of Harvard Medical School, an accomplished mountain climber and adrenaline junkie as brilliant as he was unconventional.

After years of prosecuting hard-core criminals, rising legal star Alan Bell took a private sector job in South Florida's newest skyscraper. Suddenly, he suffered such bizarre medical symptoms, doctors suspected he'd been poisoned by the Mafia. Bell's rapidly declining health forced him to flee his glamorous Miami life to a sterile "bubble" in the remote Arizona desert.

Jamie Tyrone was 49 years old when she learned she had a 91% chance of getting Alzheimer's disease - by accident through genetic testing. She was shocked, but after an initial bout with depression she decided to take action rather than concede defeat. Jamie teamed up with Dr. Marwan Sabbagh, a renowned neurologist, and together they created a resource detailing not just Jamie's experience, but expert medical advice for anyone facing the disease.

With a play opening on Broadway, and every reason to smile, Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high-risk pregnancy when she discovers the left side of her face is completely paralyzed. She is assured that 90 percent of Bell’s palsy patients experience a full recovery—like Ruhl’s own mother. But Sarah is in the unlucky ten percent. And for a woman, wife, mother, and artist working in theater, the paralysis and the disconnect between the interior and exterior brings significant and specific challenges.

Yalom offers a message that goes to the heart of psychotherapy. Taking up the central existential concerns of human life, Yalom’s work engages the problems of finding meaning in life and confronting death, concerns that had lain beyond the scope of psychiatry. Writing in a literary style that reviewers have compared to Freud, Yalom details what actually happens in the intimate human encounter that is psychotherapy. Yalom does not shrink from exposing his own thoughts and feelings about what occurs; he, too is a vulnerable and searching human being.

On a family vacation in 2009, Dr. Renée Brown Harmon felt the first jolt of fear that something might be wrong. How could her husband, Harvey, a highly intelligent physician, marathon runner, and devoted father, be struggling to keep up with their guide’s simple instructions or unable to do simple math to calculate their daughter’s age? The heartbreaking truth was confirmed nine months later when he was diagnosed with younger-onset Alzheimer’s disease at age fifty.

Where does one go without health insurance, when turned away by hospitals, clinics, and doctors? In The People’s Hospital, physician Ricardo Nuila’s stunning debut, we follow the lives of five uninsured Houstonians as their struggle for survival leads them to a hospital where insurance comes second to genuine care.

There Plant Eyes probes the ways in which blindness has shaped our ocularcentric culture, challenging deeply ingrained ideas about what it means to be “blind”. For millennia, blind­ness has been used to signify such things as thoughtlessness (“blind faith”), irrationality (“blind rage”), and unconsciousness (“blind evolution”). But at the same time, blind people have been othered as the recipients of special powers as compensation for lost sight (from the poetic gifts of John Milton to the heightened senses of the comic book hero Daredevil).

The technology invented by psychiatrist Robert G. Heath at Tulane University in 1950s and 60s has been described as one of "the most controversial yet largely undocumented experiments in US history" - controversial to us because Heath's patients included incarcerated convicts and gay men to be 'cured' of their sexual preference; controversial in its day because his work was allegedly part of MKUltra, the CIA's notorious "mind control" project. As a result, Heath's cutting-edge research and legacy were put under lock and key, buried in Tulane's archives.

Dr. Elisha Waldman's years at Jerusalem's Hadassah Medical Center were filled in equal measure with a deep sense of accomplishment, with frustration when regional politics sometimes got in the way of his patients' care, and with tension over the fine line he would have to walk when the religious traditions of some of his patients' families made it difficult for him to give these children the care he felt they deserved. Navigating the baffling Israeli bureaucracy, the ever-present threat of war, and cultural clashes, Waldman learned to be content with small victories.

The psychiatric emergency room, a fast-paced combat zone with pressure to match, thrusts its medical providers into the outland of human experience where they must respond rapidly and decisively in spite of uncertainty and, very often, danger. In this lively first-person narrative, Paul R. Linde takes listeners behind the scenes at an urban psychiatric emergency room, with all its chaos and pathos, where we witness mental health professionals doing their best to alleviate suffering.

Dr Dan Pronk served on over 100 combat missions in Afghanistan as a frontline special forces combat doctor, where the casualties he treated were his fellow SAS soldiers and commandos, local civilians and even the enemy. The thrill of adventure and the challenges of battlefield medicine brought out the very best in Dan; he discovered a sense of purpose in pushing his medical skills and courage to the limits. But there was a cost. In this frank memoir, Dan describes the highs and lows of his military-medical career, and the very real toll they took on his mental health and family life.

Singular Intimacies is the story of becoming a doctor by immersion at Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the country—and perhaps the most legendary. It is both the classic inner-city hospital and a unique amalgam of history, insanity, beauty, and intellect. When Danielle Ofri enters these 250-year-old doors as a tentative medical student, she is immediately plunged into the teeming world of urban medicine: mysterious illnesses, life-and-death decisions, patients speaking any one of a dozen languages, and overworked interns.

Cheney flips mental illness inside out, exposing the visceral story of the struggles, stigma, relationship dilemmas, treatments, and recovery techniques she and others have encountered. Sometimes humorous, sometimes harrowing, Modern Madness is the ultimate owner's manual on mental illness, breaking this complex subject down into readily understandable concepts like instructions for use, troubleshooting, maintenance, and warranties.

This is the amazing, true story of Gerald Sanford, a former New York City police officer and FDNY firefighter who retired and moved to Naples, Florida. Retirement didn’t take, and he found himself working at North Naples Fire Control and Rescue District, which is how he stumbled on an early 1900s antique fire helmet. He instantly knew the helmet was from New York City. By an amazing coincidence, Sanford presented the fire helmet back to the FDNY firehouse in the Bronx the day before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

This book highlights the dangers of leaving your care only in the hands of doctors, many of which lack the processes to perform effective therapeutic drug monitoring. In Steroids Stole My Summer, D.P. John tells the real-life story of Ryan's summer in a way that everyone can relate to.