Medical Memoirs

The nation’s best-loved vet looks back at the funniest, most absurd or heart-breaking animal encounters and situations he has been in over his long and highly successful career.

In the multibillion-dollar business of American medicine, doctors are often portrayed as culprits—opportunistic millionaires who prey on the misfortune of their hapless patients and drive up the cost of health care. But often they are the real victims of a system designed to increase profits for the insurance companies, shady businessmen, and Big Government.

In the fall of 2019, John Hendrickson wrote a groundbreaking story for The Atlantic about Joe Biden’s decades-long journey with stuttering, as well as his own. The article went viral, reaching listeners around the world and altering the course of Hendrickson’s life. Overnight, he was forced to publicly confront an element of himself that still caused him great pain.

Christine Bryden was a top civil servant and single mother of three children when she was diagnosed with dementia at the age of 46. Since then she has gone on to challenge almost every stereotype of people with dementia. This is a vivid account of the author's experiences of living with dementia, exploring the effects of memory problems, loss of independence, difficulties in communication and the exhaustion of coping with simple tasks. She describes how, with the support of her husband, Paul, she continues to lead an active life and explains how professionals and carers can help.

In this heartfelt and often humorous memoir, the author shares her unconventional path through childhood, grief, creativity, and academic success—all shaped by a unique way of learning and seeing the world. From being Dux of Business College to earning a Master of Arts with Excellence, she reveals how “thinking differently” wasn’t a setback, but a quiet superpower that guided her healing, her teaching, and her creative life.

Regarded as one of the finest journalists of her generation, Mamie Baird Magnusson's whole life was a celebration of words - words that she fought to retain in the grip of a disease which is fast becoming the scourge of the 21st century. Married to writer and broadcaster Magnus Magnusson, they had five children of whom Sally is the eldest.

In Jennifer Craig's enchanting memoir, we meet these warm-hearted yet naïve young girls as they get to grips with strict discipline, long hours and bodily fluids. But we also see the camaraderie that develops in evening study sessions, sneaked trips to the cinema and mischievous escapades with the young trainee doctors. The harsh conditions prove too much for some girls, but the opportunity to help her patients in their time of need is too much of a pull for Jenny.

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!

From Mercy Ships surgeon Dr. Mark G. Shrime comes an inspiring memoir about finding the answer to life's biggest question - "Why?" - and about following that answer through remarkable, unlikely places on the road to fulfillment, purpose, and joy.

A Silent Spring for the human body, this wide-ranging, genre-crossing literary mystery interweaves the author’s quest to understand the source of her own condition with her telling of the story of the chronically ill 19th-century diarist Alice James—ultimately uncovering the many hidden health hazards of life in America.

Stuart Jamieson's story is the story of four decades of advances in heart surgery. Taut, elegantly crafted, and ever-attentive to the patients for whom he was the last best chance, Close to the Sun is an adventurous, riveting account based on the experience of over 40,000 heart surgeries, where everything was on the line every moment in the O.R.

واحدٌ من أمتع كتب السيرة فهو يتحدَّث عن حياة الدكتورة "توحيدة عبدالرحمن" والتي تُعتبر أول طبيبة تمَّ تعيينها في الحكومة المصرية عام 1933. يدخل بنا هذا الكتاب إلى بيت الدكتورة لنتعرَّف على عائلتها وطفولتها وكيف درست في أول مدرسة حكومية للبنات وكيف تمَّ ابتعاثها لدراسة الطبّ في بريطانيا في عهد الملك فؤاد الأول وسبب نجاحها على الرَّغم من نظرة المجتمع والنّاس في ذلك الوقت للفتاة وتعليمها فكيف بسفرها لوحدها.

Lewy Body Blues: A Family’s Roller Coaster Experience with Lewy Body Dementia is an insider’s perspective on how one family adapted and learned to cope with this incredibly challenging and progressively debilitating disease. Based on a personal journey and filled with facts and strategies for handling Lewy Body Dementia, this book is essential listening for anyone desiring to learn more about this little-known brain disorder.

In this compelling memoir, Jane Hawking relates the inside story of her extraordinary marriage. As Stephen's academic renown soared, his body was collapsing under the assaults of motor neurone disease, and Jane's candid account of trying to balance his 24-hour care with the needs of their growing family is inspirational. This is a book about optimism, love and change that will resonate with listeners everywhere.

The Angina Monologues speeds from the transporting of a donor’s heart up the motorway hard shoulder, to cautionary stories of excessive intervention gone awry in US hospitals, to a traumatic trip to bring advanced cardiac surgery to the Palestinian West Bank. Nashef tells heart-stopping stories of transplants, coronary artery bypasses, aorta repair and cardiac arrest.

When Vida is born to Mina and husband Freddie, it is love at first sight. She is perfect. But it is also clear from early on that something is not right. This is the story of how Vida came to be diagnosed with rare blood disorder Diamond Blackfan Anaemia, and how Mina and her family’s lives were transformed by the experience of having a child with such a serious condition. Together, they move with fierce tenacity into a future that Mina never expected, but one that is rich with love, hope and community.

In the fall of 1995, Dr. Saray Stancic was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. By 2003, she walked regularly with a cane, had given up virtually all unnecessary physical activity, and was on numerous medications, all with horrible side effects. After stumbling upon some studies that linked MS outcomes to diet and lifestyle, Dr. Stancic undertook a radically different approach to managing her illness.

Using the most common postmortem process as the backbone of the narrative, The Chick and the Dead takes the listener through the process of an autopsy while also describing the history and changing cultures of our relationship with the dead. The book is full of vivid insight into what happens to our bodies in the end. Each chapter considers an aspect of an autopsy alongside an aspect of Carla's own life and work and touches on some of the more controversial aspects of our feelings toward death.

This inspirational story is of a courageous and charismatic personality that was Dr. NITU MANDKE, a world renowned Heart Surgeon. In a short span of 20 years Dr. Nitu Mandke completed over 12000 successful heart surgeries giving life an hope to thousands of families. Hailing from humble beginnings, Dr. Mandke showed his brilliance in sports, business and art from a very early age. He was instrumental in setting up many of the protocols in Hospitals that are still followed to this day.

In the final stretch of his doctoral internship, Dr. Jonathan Mathias Lassiter had just one more milestone to complete: the diversity project, where candidates insert themselves into a situation in which they'd experience what it’s like to be a minority and then share their experience with the class. Surprisingly, the all-white training committee failed him! They concluded that the program’s first and only Black intern did not understand diversity. Frustrated and panicked, he thought: “These white people are crazy."