Medical Biography

Richard Carlson Jr. was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when he was 21 years of age. His illness first manifested when he was an early adolescent. Modern psychiatry greatly failed Richard for over a decade. Then, after an incident involving the police, he truly understood that his diagnosis was real, and finally began the long process of recovery. Over 10 years later, his life is greatly improved. In the course of his treatment, Richard also recovered from depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and lethargy.

Born in rural Mexico, Eduardo “Lalo” García Guzmán and his family left for the United States when he was a child, picking fruits and vegetables on the migrant route from Florida to Michigan. He worked in Atlanta restaurants as a teenager before being convicted of a robbery, incarcerated, and eventually deported. Lalo landed in Mexico City as a new generation of chefs was questioning the hierarchies that had historically privileged European cuisine in elite spaces. At his acclaimed restaurant, Máximo Bistrot, he began to craft food that narrated his memories and hopes.

The little mountain hamlet of Bryson City, North Carolina, offers more than dazzling vistas. For Walt Larimore, a young "flatlander" physician setting up his first practice, the town presents its peculiar challenges as well. Schooled in the latest medical technology, the eager doctor—his wife, Barb, and two-year-old daughter, Kate, in tow—is about to discover that there are some things in rural practice for which medical school just hadn’t prepared him. But he’s about to learn.

This Close to Happy is the rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression, written from a woman's perspective and informed by an acute understanding of the implications of this disease over a lifetime. Taking off from essays on depression she has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, Daphne Merkin casts her eye back to her beginnings to try to sort out the root causes of her affliction.

One More Light takes you on a journey with veteran firefighter and paramedic James Geering. As each chapter unfolds, the heart-wrenching stories are coupled with a unique physical and mental health perspective about preventing tragedy and unnecessary suffering. It’s about maximizing the wellness and fulfillment of one another. But most of all, this is a book that ultimately leaves you with the hope that, with us at our best, we have a fighting chance to thrive in an uncertain world.

Mark Vonnegut set out in search of Eden with his VW bug, his girlfriend, his dog, and his ideals, but genetic predisposition and a whole lot of shit going down made him crazy in a culture that told him mental illness is a myth and schizophrenia is a sane response to an insane society. Describing his experiences during the late '60s and early '70s, Eden Express reveals how Mark went from being a recent college grad who was in love and living communally on a farm to having nervous breakdowns.

In Mercies in Disguise, acclaimed New York Times reporter and best-selling author Gina Kolata tells the story of the Baxleys, an upstanding family in small-town South Carolina. Many of them were doctors, but still, they are struck down by an inscrutable illness. Finally they discover the cause of the disease after a remarkable sequence of providential events. Meanwhile science, progressing for 50 years along a parallel track, handed the Baxleys a question - not a cure but a blood test that would reveal who had the gene for the disease.

After 24 years in healthcare, one fateful evening transformed Mandi from practitioner to patient. A motor vehicle accident left her with a significant traumatic brain injury that has taken her much longer than expected to recover from. Follow along as she shares her journey back from her worst day through the first year.

At 50 years of age, Amber Needham suddenly went from having perfect vision to becoming blind. Despite the life-changing tragedy of losing her sight and the frustrating challenges this created in her day-to-day life, she eventually came to accept, manage, and even celebrate her blindness. Her disability taught her a new way to see—with her heart instead of her eyes.

الرصاصة الصديقة حكايةٌ حقيقة ترويها "سونيا بوماد" عن أحداث عاشتها مع أسرتها بعد إصابة ابنتها برصاصةٍ طائشة أطلقها بعض المُحتفلين بقرار وقف إطلاق النّار عام 2006 !!

Have you ever wondered what it's like to save a life? In his book Life Changing Paramedic Stories, Dion talks about 12 life-changing experiences while working as a Canadian paramedic.

It’s the business of saving lives. Miracle Medicines goes behind the scenes of the pharmaceutical industry and into the high-security laboratories to tell the stories of the men and women - chemists, physiologists, medical and clinical researchers, engineers - who have chosen to toil for years in the lab in order to transform scientific theories into new lifesaving medicines. You’ll witness the day-to-day labors, victories and defeats of the dedicated professionals who are waging a war against the diseases that still plague mankind.

In 2002, at age 28, David MacLean woke up in a foreign land with his memory wiped clean. No money. No passport. No identity. Taken to a mental hospital by the police, MacLean then started to hallucinate so severely he had to be tied down. Soon he could remember song lyrics and scenes from television shows but not his family, his friends, or the woman he loved. All of these symptoms, it turned out, were the result of the commonly prescribed malarial medication he was taking. Upon hisreturn to the States, he struggled to piece together the fragments of his former life in a harrowing, absurd, and unforgettable journey back to himself.

At the age of 53, Tony walks away from a life of journalism and into an unknown future dogged by self-doubt and financial worry. June is 48 years old then, a writer and a teacher, and over the following nine years she watches as her husband gradually changes - in interests, goals, and behavior - until Tony has a sudden fall, ending their life as they have known it.

At the age of 28, with his Beijing-based science communications business doing well and a new relationship blossoming, Ben Bravery woke from a colonoscopy to be told he had stage 3 colorectal cancer. As a scientist, Ben understood the seriousness of his condition. Cancer had quite literally whacked him in the guts, after all. But what he didn't expect was how being a patient, and a young one at that, would make him feel. Why hadn't he been better prepared for the embarrassment and vulnerability of lying naked on the radiation table?

Acclaimed author Peg Kehret has written the true story of the year when she was twelve and stricken with polio. At first paralyzed and terrified, she fought her way to recovery, aided by doctors and therapists, a loving family, supportive roommates fighting their own battles with the disease, and plenty of grit and luck. With the humor and suspense that are her trademarks, Peg Kehret vividly recreates a year of heartbreak and triumph.

What is it like to encounter cancer? How does it feel to face the unknown, to enter a world of hope, loss, and dread? From the diagnosis of his childhood friend’s mother to his poignant memories in the lab, David Scadden’s seen the unknown world of cancer from the lens of a young boy, a classmate, a researcher, a friend, a doctor, and a neighbor. Scadden chronicles his personal memories of cancer - his visits to his sick neighbor and his classmate who left school and never came back.

This amazing tale is the story of one of America's oldest and most unusual urban hospitals. From it's inception as a "Poor House" dispensing free medical care to indigents, Chicago's Cook County Hospital has been both a renowned teaching hospital and the healthcare provider of last resort for the city's uninsured. County covers more than thirty years of its history, beginning in the late 1970s when the author began his internship, to the "Final Rounds" when the enormous iconic Victorian hospital building was replaced and hundreds of former trainees gathered to bid it an emotional farewell.

Dr. Ala Stanford knew she wanted to be a doctor by the time she was eight years old. But role models were few and far between in her working-class North Philly neighborhood. Her teachers were dismissive, and the realities of racism, sexism, and poverty threatened to derail her at every turn. Nevertheless, thanks to her faith, family, and the sheer strength of her will, today she is one of the vanishingly small number of Black women surgeons in America—and an unrelenting force in the fight for health justice.

Unexpectedly denied a visa to remain in the United States, Qanta Ahmed, a young British Muslim doctor, becomes an outcast in motion. On a whim, she accepts an exciting position in Saudi Arabia. This is not just a new job; this is a chance at adventure in an exotic land she thinks she understands, a place she hopes she will belong. What she discovers is vastly different. The Kingdom is a world apart, a land of unparalleled contrast. She finds rejection and scorn in the places she believed would most embrace her.