Medical Memoirs

When North Korean forces invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, Otto Apel was a surgical resident living in Cleveland, Ohio, with his wife and three young children. A year later he was chief surgeon of the 8076th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, constantly near the front lines in Korea. Immediately upon arriving in camp, Apel performed 80 hours of surgery. His feet swelled so badly, he had to cut his boots off, and he saw more surgical cases in those three and a half days than he would have in a year back in Cleveland.

Life as a paramedic, writes Sally Gould in this candid, witty memoir, can be traumatic, gross, dull, hilarious, magical. To make the cut, you need to be able to think outside the square, keep calm in the midst of chaos, be in possession of a strong stomach, and simply brush it off when patients die. That’s on top of having a profound understanding of the human body, plus the skills to counter its failings. It also helps to have a highly developed and oftentimes dark sense of humour.

By the age of 13, Lily Bailey was convinced she was bad. She had killed someone with a thought, spread untold disease, and ogled the bodies of other children. Only by performing an exhausting series of secret routines could she make up for what she'd done. But no matter how intricate or repetitive, no act of penance was ever enough. Beautifully written and astonishingly intimate, Because We Are Bad recounts a childhood consumed by obsessive compulsive disorder.

In the early 1900s, women were dying in large numbers from treatable diseases because they avoided receiving medical care. Examinations performed by male doctors were often demeaning and even painful. In addition, women faced stigma from illness—a diagnosis could greatly limit their ability to find husbands, jobs or be received in polite society. Motivated by personal loss and frustration over inadequate medical care, Elizabeth Blackwell, Lizzie Garret Anderson and Sophie Jex-Blake fought for a woman's place in the male-dominated medical field.

From his unarmed air ambulance, Munk and his team treated patients suffering from severe trauma, possible Ebola hemorrhagic fever, elephantiasis, malaria, and gunshot wounds. In Urgent Calls from Distant Places, the missions described are real and compelling.

One of the enduring lessons of the pandemic has been the pivotal role that nursing plays in health care—vital work that isn’t widely understood or, sadly, appreciated. Sara Fung and Amie Archibald-Varley started the wildly popular The Gritty Nurse podcast to give voice to nurses all over the world, including more than 400,000 nurses in Canada. The authors have quickly become sought-after speakers and advocates for nurses and are called on regularly by the media to talk about a wide range of issues around the profession.

A political journalist and activist, Cousins was also a professor of medical humanities at UCLA, where he studied the biochemistry of human emotions and their relationship to healing. When Cousins was hospitalized with a debilitating collagen illness, he decided to take his health into his own hands. Cousins and his doctor combated the disease together by creating a regimen of laughter and vitamin C specifically calibrated to his needs. Against all odds, the treatment worked, proving to Cousins that a positive attitude was key to his improvement.

Diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), Jeff Sutherland lost his abilities to walk and speak within two years and, confined to a wheelchair, was forced to retire from his life's work as a physician at 43. Not long after, he was locked in his own inanimate body, unable to eat, drink, or breathe without assistance. His meals were delivered through a feeding tube, and a ventilator controlled his lungs through an opening in his throat. The only parts of his body he was able to move voluntarily were his eyes.

Today he is known as Dr. Q, an internationally renowned neurosurgeon and neuroscientist who leads cutting-edge research to cure brain cancer. But not too long ago, he was Freddy, a 19-year-old undocumented migrant worker toiling in the fields of Central California. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa tells his amazing life story - from his impoverished childhood in the tiny village of Palaco, Mexico, to his harrowing border crossing and his transformation from illegal immigrant to American citizen and gifted student at the University of California at Berkeley and at Harvard Medical School.

More than four hundred abandoned suitcases filled with patients’ belongings were found when Willard Psychiatric Center closed in 1995 after 125 years of operation. They are skillfully examined here and compared to the written record to create a moving—and devastating—group portrait of twentieth-century American psychiatric care.

This is the spellbinding tale of a mysterious doctor who revolutionized neonatal care more than 100 years ago and saved some 7,000 babies. Dr. Martin Couney's story is a kaleidoscopic ride through the intersection of ebullient entrepreneurship, enlightened pediatric care, and the wild culture of world's fairs at the beginning of the American Century.

Nine million Americans are touched by aneurysms during their lifetimes. This is one story of love. Brainstorm is the candid and powerful memoir of the author's harrowing experience of an aneurysm and his road to recovery. It is a journey of love and devotion and a clash of medical beliefs and countercultures.

The story of poison is the story of power. For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy. To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns, and antidotes tested on condemned prisoners. Servants licked the royal family's spoons, tried on their underpants, and tested their chamber pots. Ironically, royals terrified of poison were unknowingly poisoning themselves daily with their cosmetics, medications, and filthy living conditions.

An exploration of vision through the case histories of six individuals - including a renowned pianist who continues to give concerts despite losing the ability to read the score, and a neurobiologist born with crossed eyes who, late in life, suddenly acquires binocular vision, and how her brain adapts to that new skill.

In this follow-up to the hugely popular Angels in the ER, Dr. Robert D. Lesslie shares more of his life-changing emergency-room encounters with nurses, doctors, patients, friends, and strangers who’ve served as God’s hands in the direst of circumstances. You’ll be deeply moved by these tales of both triumph and tragedy from the ER front line, as well as by the profound faith that has sustained Dr. Lesslie for more than 30 years on the job.

With a play opening on Broadway, and every reason to smile, Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high-risk pregnancy when she discovers the left side of her face is completely paralyzed. She is assured that 90 percent of Bell’s palsy patients experience a full recovery—like Ruhl’s own mother. But Sarah is in the unlucky ten percent. And for a woman, wife, mother, and artist working in theater, the paralysis and the disconnect between the interior and exterior brings significant and specific challenges.

Henry Marsh has spent a lifetime operating on the surgical front line. There have been exhilarating highs and devastating lows, but his love for the practice of neurosurgery has never wavered. Following the publication of his celebrated New York Times best seller Do No Harm, Marsh retired from his full-time job in England to work pro bono in Ukraine and Nepal. In Admissions he describes the difficulties of working in these troubled, impoverished countries and the further insights it has given him into the practice of medicine.

A compilation of the best ER stories that have happened to me. They are all completely true. People always want to hear "nurse stories" and I think that these stories are what they want to hear. You can bet on a lot of raised eyebrows while listening to this! These can invoke powerful emotions and give a glimpse into healthcare and show how some people really are.

Author Cory Franklin, MD, who headed the hospital's intensive care unit from the 1970s through the 1990s, shares his most unique and bizarre experiences, including the deadly Chicago heatwave of 1995, treating the first AIDS patients in the country before the disease was diagnosed, the nurse with rare Munchausen syndrome, the only surviving ricin victim, and the professor with Alzheimer's hiding the effects of the wrong medication.

One in three births is traumatic. It doesn’t have to be that way. Rebecca planned to give birth at the hospital affiliated with her university. But hospital practices and policies that were more than 20 years out of date left her with complications that seemed preventable. Embark on a journey with Rebecca as she exposes the stark realities of institutional care during childbirth and reveals inspirational solutions for parents and professionals alike.