Medical Memoirs

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.

In researching his acclaimed true-crime books, Philip Carlo interviewed some of the most infamous criminals and killers of our times in prisons and on death rows throughout the country. He was able to forge trusting relationships with his subjects, enabling him to extract the facts behind their monstrous acts and identify what motivated them to commit their horrific crimes.

At first glance, Anthony Chin-Quee looks like a traditional success story: a smart, ambitious kid who grew up to become a board-certified otolaryngologist—an ear, nose, and throat surgeon. Yet the truth is more complicated. As a self-described “not white, mostly Black, and questionably Asian man,” Chin-Quee knows that he doesn’t fit easily into any category. Growing up in a family with a background of depression, he struggled with relationships, feelings of inadequacy, and a fear of failure that made it difficult for him to forge lasting bonds with others.

Menopause hit Darcey Steinke hard. First came hot flashes. Then insomnia. Then depression. As she struggled to understand what was happening to her, she slammed up against a culture of silence and sexism. Some books promoted hormone replacement therapy. Others encouraged accepting the coming crone. Beyond that, there was little that offered a path to understanding menopause in a complex, spiritual, and intellectually engaged way.

The searing intimacy of Girl, Interrupted combined with the uncomfortable truths of The Empathy Exams in a collection of essays chronicling one woman’s experiences as both patient and caregiver, giving a unique perspective from both sides of the hospital bed.

Out of the crucible of medical training, award-winning writer Terrence Holt shapes this stunning account of residency, the years-long ordeal in which doctors are made. "Amid all the mess and squalor of the hospital, with its blind random unraveling of lives", Internal Medicine finds the compassion from which doctors discover the strength to care.

While in her early-30s, Anna Byrne was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of lymphoma. Over the next seven years, she endured four relapses, two stem cell transplants, and spent over 2,000 hours in Canadian hospitals. In 2014, she was given two years to live. Despite the odds, Anna left treatment cancer-free. She became a hospice volunteer and met Eleanor, a woman in her 70s whose death was imminent, and the two formed an unlikely friendship. Part memoir, medical guide, and spiritual text, Seven Year Summer explores the nuances of healing and hope.

Tara has it pretty good: a nice job, a writing career, a forgiving boyfriend. She should be happy. Yet Tara can't stay sober. She's terrible at monogamy. Even her psychiatrist grows sick of her and stops returning her calls. She spends most of her time putting out social fires, barely pulling things off, and feeling sick and tired.

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.

Dr. Chauncey Crandall IV was a Christian who kept his faith and his profession mostly separate when he first encountered a man named Jeff Markin. Jeff had collapsed during a massive heart attack at the entrance of the emergency room, and forty-three minutes later he was dead. He had been shocked repeatedly several times with defibrillator paddles but his heartbeat had flatlined.

When a pet is sick, people—even the rich and famous—are at their most authentic and vulnerable. They could have a Monet on the wall and an Oscar on the shelf, but if their cat gets a cold, all they want to talk about are snotty noses and sneezing fits. That’s when they call premier in-home veterinarian Dr. Amy Attas. In Pets and the City, Dr. Amy shares all the funny, heartbreaking, and life-affirming experiences she’s faced throughout her thirty-year career treating the cats and dogs of New Yorkers from Park Avenue to the projects.

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.

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.

Julie Flygare was on an ambitious path to success, entering law school at age 22, when narcolepsy destroyed the neurological boundaries between dreaming and reality in her brain. She faced terrifying hallucinations, paralysis, and excruciating sleepiness, aspects of dream sleep taking place while wide awake. Yet, narcolepsy was a wake-up call for Julie. Her illness propelled her onto a journey she never imagined, from lying paralyzed on her apartment floor to dancing euphorically at a nightclub; from the classrooms of Harvard Medical School to the start line of the Boston Marathon.

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.

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.

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.

Nearly 26 years after receiving her first heart transplant, Amy Silverstein's donor heart plummeted into failure. If she wanted to live, she had to take on the grueling quest for a new heart - immediately. A shot at survival meant uprooting her life and moving across the country to California. When her friends heard of her plans, there was only one reaction: "I'm there." Nine remarkable women - Joy, Jill, Leja, Jody, Lauren, Robin, Valerie, Ann, and Jane - put demanding jobs and pressing family obligations on hold to fly across the country and be by Amy's side.