Medical Professional

Following up her international best seller The Zookeeper's Wife, Diane Ackerman tells the breathtaking story of the stroke that deprived her husband, Paul West - a distinguished novelist and poet - of every scrap of language beyond the syllable "mem". In her characteristically glorious prose, Ackerman weaves together the latest science on stroke and the brain’s ability to store and process language, with her intensely personal journey as caregiver in helping Paul to an extraordinary recovery.

Dreams from My Mother is an inspiring story about childhood, race, identity, family, friendship, hope and what makes us who we are. Ultimately, it is an incredibly moving story of a mother and a daughter separated by society, but united in the dreams they shared for her future.

On the morning of October 21, 1966, Kathleen Middleton, a music teacher in suburban London, awoke choking and gasping, convinced disaster was about to strike. An hour later, a mountain of rubble containing waste from a coal mine collapsed above the village of Aberfan, swamping buildings and killing 144 people, many of them children. Among the doctors and emergency workers who arrived on the scene was John Barker, a psychiatrist from Shelton Hospital, in Shrewsbury.

While everyone knows of the Ice Bucket Challenge, the viral craze that swept the nation in summer 2014, too few know the truly inspirational story behind it. Pete Frates was a man at war with his own body, a man whose love for others was unshakable. He was a man who refused to fight alone and, in so doing, mobilized a global army to combat one of the most devastating diseases on earth: ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease.

Cory Friedman woke up one morning when he was five years old with the uncontrollable urge to twitch his neck. From that day forward his life became a hell of irrepressible tics and involuntary utterances, and Cory embarked on an excruciating journey from specialist to specialist to discover the cause of his disease. Soon it became unclear what tics were symptoms of his disease and what were side effects of the countless combinations of drugs. The only certainty is that it kept getting worse. Simply put: Cory Friedman's life was a living hell.

From the challenges of navigating disorientation to the moments when guilt and resentments creep in, listeners are guided gently through slow-burning grief. Along the way, Davis shares how her own fractured family came together, and how her father revealed his true self - always kind, even when he couldn't recognize his own daughter. The result is an achingly beautiful work on the fragile human condition from a profoundly wise and empathetic writer.

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.

In 2004, doctors discovered that Carmen Rice had a stage 4 glioblastoma multiforme brain tumor, one of the deadliest of all cancers—the same cancer which killed John McCain, Edward Kennedy, and Beau Biden. After being diagnosed with a glioblastoma tumor, 29-year-old Brittany Maynard made headline news when she moved to Oregon to die with dignity. Carmen's doctor gave her six months to live, but with her faith in God and tenacious spirit, Carmen just kept beating the odds. They Call Me "The Miracle" is her story.

Written in 1857, this is the autobiography of a Jamaican woman whose fame rivalled Florence Nightingale's during the Crimean War. Seacole's offer to volunteer as a nurse in the war met with racism and refusal. Undaunted, Seacole set out independently to the Crimea where she acted as doctor and 'mother' to wounded soldiers while running her business, the 'British Hotel'. A witness to key battles, she gives vivid accounts of how she coped with disease, bombardment and other hardships at the Crimean battlefront.

Galen of Pergamum (A.D. 129-ca. 216) began his remarkable career tending to wounded gladiators in provincial Asia Minor. Later in life he achieved great distinction as one of a small circle of court physicians to the family of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, at the very heart of Roman society. Susan Mattern's The Prince of Medicine offers the first authoritative biography in English of this brilliant, audacious, and profoundly influential figure.

Since it was first published in 1995, The Wounded Storyteller has occupied a unique place in the body of work on illness. Both the collective portrait of a so-called "remission society" of those who suffer from some type of illness or disability and a cogent analysis of their stories within a larger framework of narrative theory, Frank's book has reached a large and diverse following, including the ill, medical professionals, and scholars of literary theory. In this new edition, Frank adds a preface describing the personal and cultural times when the first edition was written.

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.

A family doctor with limited surgical experience, Dr. Dave Hnida volunteered for two tours of duty in Iraq - first as a battalion surgeon with a combat unit and then as trauma chief at the busiest Combat Support Hospital (CSH) during the Surge. Like a modern-day M*A*S*H, Dr. Hnida and his team conducted surgery under terrible conditions in a series of tents connected to the occasional run-down building.

From Darkness to Sight chronicles the remarkable life journey of Dr. Ming Wang, a world-renowned laser eye surgeon and philanthropist. As a teenager, Ming fought valiantly to escape one of history’s darkest eras - China’s Cultural Revolution - during which millions of innocent youth were deported to remote areas to face a life sentence of poverty and hard labor. Through his own tenacity and his parents’ tireless efforts to provide a chance of freedom for their son, Ming eventually made his way to America with $50 in his pocket and an American dream in his heart.

November 13, 2021 will be forever burned into my memory. That day, my sister passed away via medical assistance in dying after an 18-month battle with metastatic breast cancer. Medical assistance in dying became legal in Canada in 2016. Since then, thousands of terminally ill patients have taken advantage of their right to die. I never dreamed that my own sister would be one of them. Jennifer's Choice is the poignant story of the final year and a half of Jennifer's life, and chronicles not only her experiences, but also those of her family as we supported her.

Now settled into the sleepy Yorkshire village of Darrowby, and married to Helen the farmer’s daughter, James Herriot thinks he’s finally got himself sorted. But life as a vet in the 1930s was never going to be easy. Quite aside from his unpredictable colleagues, brothers Siegfried and Tristan Farnon, he must contend with new-fangled medical techniques, delivering calves after far too much homemade wine, and a grudge-holding dog called Magnus who never forgets.

When the partner of Emmy Award–winning screenwriter Abi Morgan abruptly collapsed from a mysterious illness, doctors were concerned that he would not survive. Then, six months later, Jacob woke from his coma, to the delight and relief of his family and friends—except this proved to be anything but a Hollywood ending. Because to Jacob, the woman standing at his bedside, who had cared for him all these months, was not his partner. Not his children’s mother. Not the woman he loved. Sure, she looked like his Abi, but this was an imposter, living someone else’s life.

From insulin comas and lobotomy to incarceration and exile, Walter Brown chronicles the troubling history of the diagnosis and (often ineffective) treatment of bipolar disorder through the centuries, before the publication of a groundbreaking research paper in 1949. Cade's "Lithium Salts in the Treatment of Psychotic Excitement" described, for the first time, lithium's astonishing efficacy at both treating and preventing the recurrence of manic-depressive episodes, and would eventually transform the lives of patients, pharmaceutical researchers, and practicing physicians worldwide.

This audiobook is a story of recovery and self-discovery with ups and downs, struggles, and successes. The journey starts with an introduction that sets the context for a series of chapters describing the physical and emotional aspects of the recovery.

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.