Medical Biography

SuperSummary, a modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, offers high-quality instructional study guides for challenging works of literature. This audio study guide for When Breath Becomes Air by Dr. Paul Kalanithi includes detailed summary and analysis of each chapter and an in-depth exploration of the book’s multiple symbols, motifs, and themes such as the meaning of death and the doctor-patient dichotomy.

LiveReal recounts a family's journey through their daughter's liver transplant. It is a story of faith and miracles, following a life-threatening diagnosis of Biliary Atresia. This story provides a candid portrait of the fears, struggles, and hard decisions that her loving parents had to face. From a Kasai surgery to the prospect of a second transplant, the family experienced the beauty and heartache of life events.

In “Lung Cancer Free” Dr. Lori Friesen and Keith Zafren share their journey from the shock of her husband’s initial diagnosis, through surgery and chemo, to the point where he was dying, being sustained on supplemental oxygen just to keep breathing, to where they are today: Keith is alive, breathing easily and freely with beautiful, healthy lungs.

Caroline Crampton’s life was upended at the age of seventeen, when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a relatively rare blood cancer. After years of invasive treatment, she was finally given the all clear. But being cured of the cancer didn’t mean she felt well. Instead, the fear lingered, and she found herself always on the alert, braced for signs that the illness had reemerged.

Eloquent. Philosophical. Introspective. These are not the words usually associated with an autistic child. But in a remarkable display of courage and creativity, a boy named Tito has shattered stereotypes, and in The Mind Tree makes us question all of our previous assumptions about autism. For Tito is severely autistic and nearly nonverbal, and this is his story.

An inside account of the fight to contain the world's deadliest diseases - and the panic and corruption that make them worse. The Next Pandemic is a firsthand account of disasters like anthrax, bird flu, and others - and how we could do more to prevent their return. It is both a gripping story of our brushes with fate and an urgent lesson on how we can keep ourselves safe from the inevitable next pandemic.

A decade after World War II, there was still no such thing as open-heart surgery, and yet half a million Americans were dying from heart disease every year. After the first daring operation in 1954 and through the next three decades, five heroic surgeons braved the scorn of their peers, withstood fierce desperation, and faced possible death in order to devise procedures that would save overwhelming numbers of those doomed children and provide hope for a new life to all manner of heart-failing individuals.

In his early 20s, Mindy Greiling's son, Jim, was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder after experiencing delusions that demanded he kill his mother. At the time, and for more than a decade after, Greiling was a Minnesota state legislator who struggled, along with her husband, to navigate and improve the state's inadequate mental health system. Fix What You Can is an illuminating and frank account of caring for a person with a mental illness, told by a parent and advocate.

Julia Buckley needs a miracle. Like a third of the UK population, she has a chronic pain condition. According to her doctors, it can't be cured. She doesn't believe them. She does believe in miracles, though. It's just a question of tracking one down. Julia's search for a cure takes her on a global quest, exploring the boundaries between science, psychology and faith with practitioners on the fringes of conventional, traditional and alternative medicine.

For most of human history, mental illness has been largely untreatable. Sufferers lived their lives - if they survived - in and out of asylums, accumulating life's wreckage around them. In 1948, all that changed when an Australian doctor and recently returned prisoner of war, working alone in a disused kitchen, set about an experimental treatment for one of the scourges of mankind - manic depression, or bipolar disorder. That doctor was John Cade and in that small kitchen he stirred up a miracle.

The Invisible Black Nurse emerged from research grounded in historical reviews and contemporary perspectives that describe the experiences of Black nurses as their various roles as clinicians, educators, administrators and researchers. Recurring themes include feeling invisible, feeling devalued and being held to a higher standards than their peers in their professional role. She has presented her research at various professional nursing conferences and the Association of Psychiatric Nursing.

In Voicemails from My Sister, author Kate Russell explores her sister Sibby's bipolar schizoaffective disorder through true stories that illustrate the disease and how medication both helped and hindered its progress. From her mother's drug use during pregnancy, which led to an incomplete diagnosis, to Sibby's current mental status, as a 37-year-old ward of the state, Kate breaks down her sister's disease by highlighting events that contributed to the uprise and decline of her well-being.

This book is a physician’s reflection on his 40-plus years of interactions with family, friends, patients, medical students, and residents. The short stories are meant to show how humanism, professionalism, and ethical behavior can enrich one’s life and those of others. The path leading to the insights is laid out for the listener using humor and reflection. All the stories are true and arranged to show how we all grow in our approach to life. Every moment in our life is worth experiencing and each opens an often unexpected door for us.

In 1959, a Cincinnati pharmaceutical firm, the William S. Merrell Company, quietly began distributing samples of an exciting new wonder drug already popular around the world. Touted as a sedative without risks, thalidomide was handed out freely, under the guise of clinical trials, by doctors who believed approval by the Food and Drug Administration was imminent. But in 1960, when the application for thalidomide landed on the desk of FDA medical reviewer Frances Kelsey, she quickly grew suspicious.

It begins with numbness on her left leg. Then it spreads. Even though an MRI finds a "mass" on her brainstem, it takes two more years for Meredith O'Brien to learn what is causing that numbness. Months after her sixty-five-year-old mother dies from a fast-moving cancer, weeks after her father is hospitalized and she experiences an unexpected job change, she learns she has multiple sclerosis. Suddenly, Meredith, a married mother of three teens, has to figure out how to move forward into a life she no longer recognizes.

An estimated 50 million people in the world suffer from dementia. Diseases such as Alzheimer’s erase parts of one’s memory but are also often said to erase the self. People don’t simply die from such diseases; they are imagined, in the clichés of our era, as vanishing in plain sight, fading away, or enduring a long goodbye. In On Vanishing, Lynn Casteel Harper, a Baptist minister and nursing home chaplain, investigates the myths and metaphors surrounding dementia and aging....

For years, they came in on weekends to plan and practice—nearly sixty surgeons, nurses, and anesthesiologists, preparing to harmonize in a vast medical symphony. For the team at Mayo Clinic, it was their most complex surgery to date: a face transplant. At the heart of this event was Andy Sandness. He grappled with feelings of isolation and shame after a disfiguring suicide attempt but was determined to reclaim his future, to be seen as ordinary, and to belong again.

The follow up to Suzanne's Best of Year debut memoir, FRONTAL MATTER: GLUE GONE WILD, STARGAZING is a humorous look at piecing a life back together after being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.

John's medical memoir was born from chaotic, disjointed, funny and frightening late-night letters to friends over email (any recipients of which all those years ago will likely walk away now). Those manic blogs from the hospital wards during under-slept call nights (which left a few friends wondering if he had invaded the hospital pharmacy) were the genesis for this book, Playing Doctor.

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo shares the inspiring story of how he came to be who he is. After experiencing abuse as a child, Dr. Ladapo was incapable of connecting emotionally with other people. He was dissociated from virtually everything in his life and numbly powered through college, medical school, and residency to become a doctor and university professor. It wasn’t until he fell in love with his wife that he was forced to come face-to-face with the enormous emotional and spiritual disruption caused by his deeply buried trauma.