Medical Memoirs

In his memoir of an improbable start-up in public health, Ashok Alaxander writes about an organization with the audacious goal of ending needless deaths and sickness at scale, amongst India's poorest mothers and children. It is a great leap emboldened by an unshakable faith in the 'idea that cannot be denied'. It is a tale of adventure filled with twists and turns, told with a disarming honesty.

Dr. Rawdy, reconstruye su exitosa carrera en este audiolibro, mediante una serie de experiencias profesionales derivadas de su propio día a día en consulta.

Sara appears to have everything it takes to be happy: a loving wife, a beautiful home, and a successful biotech career. But inside, she’s battling a perplexing, self-destructive impulse that has driven her to sabotage relationships—including her marriage.

Widely known today as the "Angel of the Battlefield", Clara Barton's personal life has always been shrouded in mystery. In Clara Barton, Professional Angel, Elizabeth Brown Pryor presents a biography of Barton that strips away the heroic exterior and reveals a complex and often trying woman. Based on the papers Clara Barton carefully saved over her lifetime, this biography is the first one to draw on these recorded thoughts. Not always altruistic, her accomplishments were nonetheless extraordinary.

An Epidemic of Absence asks what will happen in developing countries, which, as they become more affluent, have already seen an uptick in allergic disease: Will India end up more allergic than Europe? Velasquez-Manoff also details a controversial underground movement that has coalesced around the treatment of immune-mediated disorders with parasites. Against much of his better judgment, he joins these do-it-yourselfers and reports his surprising results.

A doctor’s powerful and deeply human memoir about the mysteries of the brain and his 40-year quest to find a treatment for multiple sclerosis.

Dr. W. Lee Warren, a practicing brain surgeon, assumed he knew most outcomes for people with glioblastoma, head injuries, and other health-care problems. Yet even as he tried to give patients hope, his own heart would sink as he realized, I've seen the end of you. But it became far more personal when the acclaimed doctor experienced an unimaginable family tragedy. That's when he reached the end of himself. Gripping medical stories serve as the backdrop for a raw, honest look at how we can remain on solid ground when everything goes wrong.

One morning in late 2017, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni woke up with strangely blurred vision. He wondered at first if some goo or gunk had worked its way into his right eye. But this was no fleeting annoyance, no fixable inconvenience.

Cystic fibrosis was once a mysterious disease that killed infants and children. Now it could be the key to healing millions with genetic diseases of every type - from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to diabetes and sickle cell anemia. Told from the perspectives of the patients, families, physicians, scientists, and philanthropists fighting on the front lines, Breath from Salt is a remarkable story of unlikely scientific and medical firsts, of setbacks and successes, and of people who refused to give up hope....

San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu (God's hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves - "anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times" and needed extended medical care - ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for 20 years. Laguna Honda, lower-tech but human-paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished.

When Henry Scowcroft's partner, Zarah, was diagnosed with stage-four bladder cancer in 2016, their world fell apart. An award-winning science writer for Cancer Research UK, Henry had spent 14 years at the coal-face of cancer research, but now the disease had infiltrated his personal life too. Henry uses this unique perspective to tell the story of Zarah's illness, how he tried in vain to use everything he'd learnt in his professional career to try to save her and in doing so, how he realised that even a career writing about cancer daily isn't enough preparation for what comes next.

Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases, and even into her 30s, she only knew that her aunt had died of a rare illness called Chagas. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas - or the kissing bug disease - is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus.

In the insightful narrative tradition of Oliver Sacks, Monkey Mind is an uplifting, smart, and very funny memoir of life with anxiety - America’s most common psychological complaint. We all think we know what being anxious feels like - it is the instinct that made us run from wolves in the prehistoric age and pushes us to perform in the modern one - but for forty million American adults, anxiety is an insidious condition that defines daily life. Yet no popular memoir has been written about that experience - until now.

Switching Time is the first story centering on multiple personality disorder to be told by the treating physician. It is the incredible saga of a young woman stranded in unimaginable darkness who, in order to survive, created 17 different versions of herself. One by one, Karen's "alters" began showing themselves: men, women, young boys, a toddler, black, white, vicious, nurturing, prim, licentious. And their "stepping out" confronted Baer with the challenge of a lifetime.

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.

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.

Dr Dan Pronk served on over 100 combat missions in Afghanistan as a frontline special forces combat doctor, where the casualties he treated were his fellow SAS soldiers and commandos, local civilians and even the enemy. The thrill of adventure and the challenges of battlefield medicine brought out the very best in Dan; he discovered a sense of purpose in pushing his medical skills and courage to the limits. But there was a cost. In this frank memoir, Dan describes the highs and lows of his military-medical career, and the very real toll they took on his mental health and family life.

Oftentimes, psychic "gifts" don’t feel like a gift at all. In this thrilling memoir, Sarah K. Grace describes in vivid detail what it's like to be in the trenches of some of California's busiest 911 systems as both a paramedic and highly sensitive clairvoyant/empath.

By the time he was 30, Dr. Benjamin Rush had signed the Declaration of Independence, edited Common Sense, toured Europe as Benjamin Franklin’s protégé, and become John Adams’s confidant, and was soon to be appointed Washington’s surgeon general. And as with the greatest Revolutionary minds, Rush was only just beginning his role in 1776 in the American experiment.

Fergal Keane has spent his adult life witnessing war, travelling through dangerous or devastated places and reporting the atrocities back to the rest of the world. In the course of those decades, he has lost friends, sustained injuries and experienced countless near misses. He has patched up colleagues and seen the worst of humanity: mothers robbed of their children and bodies mutilated. Along the way, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet he could not stop going back to the wars.