Medical Memoirs

Bad Call is Mike Scardino's visceral, fast-moving, and mordantly funny account of the summers he spent working as an "ambulance attendant" on the mean streets of late-1960s New York. Fueled by adrenaline and Sabrett's hot dogs, young Mike spends his days speeding from one chaotic emergency to another. His adventures take him into the middle of incipient race riots, to the scene of a plane crash at JFK airport and into private lives all over Queens, where New Yorkers are suffering, and dying, in unimaginable ways.

Arriving in 1970s London as a fresh-faced Canadian, Bruce Fogle assumed that because he knew the language, he would understand the English. As a graduate of the world’s best veterinary school, he also thought his profession would come naturally to him. He quickly learned not to make assumptions....

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.

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.

We have lost the war on cancer. We spend $150 billion each year treating it, yet - a few innovations notwithstanding - a patient with cancer is as likely to die of it as one was 50 years ago. Most new drugs add mere months to one's life at agonizing physical and financial cost. In The First Cell, Azra Raza offers a searing account of how both medicine and our society (mis)treats cancer, how we can do better, and why we must.

The heart of many hospitals is the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). It is a place where humanity, ethics, and science collide in dramatic and deeply personal ways as parents, doctors, and nurses grapple with sometimes unanswerable questions: When does life begin? When and how should life end? And what does it mean to be human? Nearly 20 years ago, Dr. John D. Lantos wrote The Lazarus Case, a seminal work on ethical dilemmas in neonatology. He described the NICU as “a strong, strange, powerful place”. The

Anyone who has seen a child recover from a wound or a broken bone knows that kids are made to heal. Their bodies are more resilient, more adaptive, and far more able to withstand acute stress than adults'. In this inspiring memoir, Dr. Kurt Newman draws from his long experience as a pediatric surgeon working at one of our nation's top children's hospitals to make the case that children are more than miniature adults.

His name was Joshua Silver. He was 23 years old, educated, and had an impressive vocabulary. The NYPD had found Joshua Silver naked in Times Square, barking like a dog. It was just another night for Julie Holland, the attending doctor in the world famous Bellevue Hospital's psychiatric emergency room.

In This Common Secret, Dr. Susan Wicklund chronicles her emotional and dramatic twenty-year career on the front lines of the abortion war. Growing up in working class, rural Wisconsin, Wicklund had her own painful abortion at a young age. It was not until she became a doctor that she realized how many women shared her ordeal of an unwanted pregnancy - and how hidden this common experience remains.

These are the extraordinary realities of the NHS front line. From the historic junior doctor strikes to the 'humanitarian crisis' declared by the Red Cross, the overstretched health service is on the precipice. This is a powerful polemic on its systematic degradation and a letter of optimism to that same health service and those who support it. It captures with tenderness a new doctor's experiences of an NHS at breaking point.

Wie ist es, seit fünfzig Jahren mit einem Pfeifton im Ohr zu leben? Und: Woher kommt er überhaupt? Wie kann eine Einladung zum "Literarischen Quartett" zu einer Knieverletzung führen? Wie bricht man sich beim Meditieren einen Knochen? Axel Hacke weiß es und erzählt in diesem Buch die Geschichte und Geschichten seines eigenen Körpers, vom Standpunkt eines Mannes in der zweiten Hälfte der Sechziger aus gesehen: Es geht um die Gebrechen, aber auch um die Triumphe des Körpers und um das große, nie nachlassende Staunen über das Funktionieren desselben.

Diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2008, Susan Gubar underwent radical debulking surgery, an attempt to excise the cancer by removing part or all of many organs in the lower abdomen. Her memoir mines the deepest levels of anguish and devotion as she struggles to come to terms with her body’s betrayal and the frightful protocols of contemporary medicine. She finds solace in the abiding love of her husband, children, and friends while she searches for understanding in works of literature, visual art, and the testimonies of others who suffer with various forms of cancer.

Falling into the Fire is psychiatrist Christine Montross's thoughtful investigation of the gripping patient encounters that have challenged and deepened her practice. Beautifully written, deeply felt, Falling into the Fire brings us inside the doctor’s mind, illuminating the grave human costs of mental illness as well as the challenges of diagnosis and treatment. At once rigorous and meditative, Falling into the Fire is an intimate portrait of psychiatry, allowing the reader to witness the humanity of the practice and the enduring mysteries of the mind.

Ally was at a breaking point when she woke up in a psych ward at the age of 18. She couldn't put a sentence together, let alone take a shower, eat a meal, or pick up a phone. What had gone wrong? In recent years, she had produced a feature film, a popular reality show for a major network, and had acted in an off-Broadway play. But now Ally was pushed to a psychotic break after struggling since she was seven years old with physical symptoms that no doctor could explain - everything from joint pain to night sweats, memory loss, nausea, and brain fog.

As heard on the hit podcast Cancer in the Form of a Question. Jeff Stewart is a Jeopardy! champion and pharma insider whose cancer was discovered when he tried to donate his kidney. Stewart's story of facing cancer with composure is inspiring.

ही कथा आहे, एका विख्यात मानसोपचार तज्ज्ञाची आणि त्याच्या पेशंटची! कॅथरीन या रुग्णावर अठरा महिने उपचार करणार्‍या मानसोपचारतज्ज्ञ डॉ. ब्रायन वीज़ यांना म्हणावं तसं यश येत नव्हतं. कॅथरीनला सतत भयानक स्वप्नं पडत, अतिचिंतेचे अ‍ॅटॅक्स येत. जेव्हा पारंपरिक उपचारपद्धती तिच्याबाबतीत अयशस्वी ठरल्या, तेव्हा डॉ. वीज़ यांनी संमोहन उपचार पद्धती वापरायची ठरवली आणि त्या उपचारपद्धतीने कॅथरीनला तिचे पूर्वजन्म दिसू लागले. डॉ. वीज़ थक्क झाले, कॅथरीनच्या सद्य जन्मातल्या सर्व आजारांची, प्रश्‍नांची उत्तरं तिच्या पूर्वजन्मात दडली आहेत, हे समजल्यावर! त्यांना आश्‍चर्य वाटलंच, पण मनात साशंकताही होती.

Working as a vet for nearly five decades, James Cameron Weir has his fair share of stories to tell. From escapee parrots to a stoned cat, helping in charity parades and assisting farmers in the middle of the night, James has seen it all. Here, he recounts stories not only from his own days in practice, but also tales from his colleagues and the history of animal welfare in Scotland. Anecdotes of all creatures great and small can be found within.

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.

All Janine Urbaniak Reid ever wanted was for everyone she loved to be okay so she might relax and maybe be happy. Her life strategy was simple: do everything right. This included trying to be the perfect mother to her three kids so they would never experience the kind of pain she pretended not to feel growing up. What she didn’t expect was the chaos of an out-of-control life that begins when her young son’s hand begins to shake.

As a medical detective of the modern world, forensic pathologist Ryan Blumenthal’s chief goal is to bring perpetrators to justice. He has performed thousands of autopsies, which have helped bring numerous criminals to book. In Autopsy he covers the hard lessons learnt as a rookie pathologist, as well as some of the most unusual cases he’s encountered. During his career, for example, he has dealt with high-profile deaths, mass disasters, death by lightning and people killed by African wildlife.