Medical Memoirs

A riveting and candid account of a young journalist's awakening to a life of chronic illness, weaving together her personal story with reporting to shed light on how Americans live with long-term diagnoses today.

Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, it never occurred to Uché Blackstock and her twin sister, Oni, that they would be anything but physicians. In the 1980s, their mother headed an organization of Black women physicians, and for years the girls watched these fiercely intelligent women in white coats tend to their patients and neighbors, host community health fairs, cure ills, and save lives.

In this new book, Kidder gives us the superb story of a hero for our time. Strength in What Remains is a wonderfully written, inspiring account of one man’s remarkable American journey and of the ordinary people who helped him–a brilliant testament to the power of will and of second chances.

Alf Wight (aka James Herriot) grew up in Glasgow, where he lived during a happy childhood and then through the challenging years of training at the Glasgow Veterinary College. The story of how the young vet later traveled to the small Yorkshire town of Thirsk, aka Darrowby, to take the job of assistant vet is one that is well known through James Herriot's celebrated books and the popular All Creatures Great and Small television series. But Jim Wight's biography ventures beyond the trials and tribulations of his father's life as a veterinarian to reveal the man behind the stories.

Recalling remarkable cases - and people - from a career launched in the first days of Emergency Medicine, Dr. Paul Seward leads us in his memoir through suspenseful diagnoses and explorations of anatomy. Within the conditions of great stress and rapid decision-making that are routine in the ER, Dr. Seward tells us that medical staff must be more than technicians of the body: They must be restorers of the human.

A book for psychotherapists and their clients — and for anyone who wants to make the journey from shame to unshame. Carolyn Spring, author of ‘Recovery is my best revenge: my experience of trauma, abuse and dissociative identity disorder’, documents in this, her second book, her journey through psychotherapy to heal and resolve trauma-based shame, which had resulted in a catastrophic mental breakdown in her early thirties and an eventual diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID).

Fans of true crime shows like CSI, NCIS, Criminal Minds, and Law and Order know that when it comes to “getting the bad guy” behind bars, your best chance of success boils down to the strength of your evidence—and the forensic science used to obtain it. Beyond the silver screen, forensic science has been used for decades to help solve even the most tough-to-crack cases.

In medical school, Paul Farmer found his life’s calling: to cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. Tracy Kidder’s magnificent account shows how one person can make a difference in solving global health problems through a clear-eyed understanding of the interaction of politics, wealth, social systems, and disease. Profound, Mountains Beyond Mountains takes us from Harvard to Haiti, Peru, Cuba, and Russia as Farmer changes people’s minds through his dedication to the philosophy that “the only real nation is humanity.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the last half of the twentieth century, Don Thomas discovered a cure for every marrow-based disease—like leukemia, lymphoma, and sickle-cell anemia—forever changing treatment for some of the deadliest illnesses. His feats were extraordinary, earning him a Nobel Prize, and the cascade of treatments he inspired have reshaped and will continue to reshape the practice of clinical medicine. Yet no one has ever written Thomas’s courageous story.Dr. Frederick R. Appelbaum, a member of Thomas’s research team, does so for the first time.

While much has been written about the minds and methods of the medical professionals who save our lives, precious little has been said about their emotions. Physicians are assumed to be objective, rational beings, easily able to detach as they guide patients and families through some of life’s most challenging moments. But understanding doctors’ emotional responses to the life-and-death dramas of everyday practice can make all the difference on giving and getting the best medical care.

The New York Times number-one best seller. At the age of 36, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live.

Karl Deisseroth has spent his life pursuing truths about the human mind, both as a renowned clinical psychiatrist and as a researcher creating and developing the revolutionary field of optogenetics, which uses light to help decipher the brain’s workings. In Projections, he combines his knowledge of the brain’s inner circuitry with a deep empathy for his patients to examine what mental illness reveals about the human mind and the origin of human feelings - how the broken can illuminate the unbroken.

As an emergency room doctor working on the rapid evaluation unit, Dr. Thomas Fisher has about three minutes to spend with the patients who come into the South Side of Chicago ward where he works before directing them to the next stage of their care. Bleeding: three minutes. Untreated wound that becomes life-threatening: three minutes. Kidney failure: three minutes. He examines his patients inside and out, touches their bodies, comforts and consoles them, and holds their hands on what is often the worst day of their lives.

In this evocative account of navigating pregnancy loss, Jessica Zucker confronts the cultural silence around miscarriages and illuminates how she built a movement from her experience, transforming trauma into human connection. Drawing from her psychological expertise and her work as the creator of the #IHadaMiscarriage campaign, I Had a Miscarriage is a heart-wrenching, thought-provoking, and validating book about navigating these liminal spaces and the vitality of truth telling.

In The Knife Man, Wendy Moore unveils John Hunter's murky and macabre world - a world characterized by public hangings, secret expeditions to dank churchyards, and gruesome human dissections in pungent attic rooms. This is a fascinating portrait of a remarkable pioneer and his determined struggle to haul surgery out of the realms of meaningless superstitious ritual and into the dawn of modern medicine.

Nature holds the answers for Raynor and her husband, Moth. After walking 630 miles homeless along The Salt Path, the windswept and wild English coastline now feels like their home. And despite Moth's terminal diagnosis, against all medical odds, he seems revitalized in nature - outside, they discover that anything is possible. Now, life beyond The Salt Path awaits. As they return to four walls, the sense of home is illusive and returning to normality is proving difficult - until an incredible gesture by someone who reads their story changes everything.