This is Going to Hurt was the publishing phenomenon of the century. It has been read by millions, translated into 37 languages, and adapted into a major BBC television series. But that was only part of the story. Now, Adam Kay returns and will once again have you in stitches in his painfully funny and startlingly powerful follow-up, Undoctored: The Story of a Medic Who Ran out of Patients. In his most honest and incisive book yet, he reflects on what's happened since hanging up his scrubs and examines a life inextricably bound up with medicine. Battered and bruised from his time on the NHS frontline, Kay looks back, moves forwards and opens up some old wounds. Hilarious and heartbreaking, horrifying and humbling, Undoctored is the astonishing portrait of a life by one of Britain's best-loved storytellers.

"How Doctors Think is a window into the mind of the physician and an insightful examination of the all-important relationship between doctors and their patients. In this myth-shattering work, Jerome Groopman explores the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make. He pinpints why doctors succeed and why they err. Most important, Groopman shows when and how doctors can - with our help - avoid snap judgments, embrace uncertainty, communicate effectively, and deploy other skills that can profoundly impact our health." --

By turns heartbreaking, hilarious, and utterly human, The House of God is a mesmerizing and provocative novel about Roy Basch and five of his fellow interns at the most renowned teaching hospital in the country. "The raunchy, troubling, and hilarious novel that turned into a cult phenomenon. Singularly compelling...brutally honest."-- The New York Times Struggling with grueling hours and sudden life-and-death responsibilities, Basch and his colleagues, under the leadership of their rule-breaking senior resident known only as the Fat Man, must learn not only how to be fine doctors but, eventually, good human beings. A phenomenon ever since it was published, The House of God was the first unvarnished, unglorified, and uncensored portrait of what training to become a doctor is truly like, in all its terror, exhaustion and black comedy. With more than two million copies sold worldwide, it has been hailed as one of the most important medical novels ever written. With an introduction by John Updike

"By shedding light on how doctors cope with the stresses and responsibilities of patients, colleagues, lawyers, and their personal lives, she explains why it is important that patients know how emotions influence the way physicians treat their patients both medically and interpersonally. Exploring the full range of human emotion--from the fear of making a fatal mistake to the pride and elation of triumphing over death, What Doctors Feel allows patients at the other end of the stethoscope to have a good listen to the beat of the emotional life behind the white coat."--Beacon Press

The sequel to the bestselling and highly acclaimed The House of God One of the most prominent and enduring titles in medical fiction is the bitingly funny House of God, which has sold more than 2 million copies, becoming required reading for generations of medical students and health care professionals. With Man's 4th Best Hospital, Samuel Shem "the comic genius and holy terror of medicine"* returns us to the hilarious and heartbreaking world of modern medicine. After The House of God, the resident known as The Fat Man and his eccentric band of interns scattered to the four corners of the country. Today Fats, now rich and famous, has been lured across town to the House of God's WASPy rival, Man's Best Hospital. But the august institution has sunk from being ranked the best hospital in the country to an embarrassing, and unacceptable, 4th! Fats' mission? To help the hospital climb back up the rankings. But as always, he's pursuing his own agenda. . . At his new Future of Medicine Clinic, the team comes back together to renew their life-changing friendships and teach a new generation of interns and residents. In a medical landscape dominated by computer screens and corrupted by money, they have a daunting goal: "To put the human back into healthcare." What follows is an emotional and laugh-out-loud novel that reflects the issues in American healthcare today, from the tyranny of computer screens to doctor burnout to the greed of the health insurance industry. * Bill McKibben

Singular Intimacies is the story of becoming a doctor by immersion at New York's 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 the doors of this 250-year-old institution as a tentative medical student, she is immediately plunged into the teeming world of urban medicine: mysterious illnesses, patients speaking any one of a dozen languages, overworked interns devising audacious strategies to cope with the feverish intensity of a big-city hospital. Yet the emphasis of Singular Intimacies is not so much on the arduous hours in medical training (which certainly exist here) but on the evolution of an instinct for healing.^

For two decades, Dr. Danielle Ofri has cared for patients at Bellevue, the oldest public hospital in the country and a crossroads for the world's cultures. In Medicine in Translation , she introduces us, in vivid, moving portraits, to the patients she has known. They have braved language barriers, religious and racial divides, and the emotional and practical difficulties of exile in order to access quality health care. Sharing their journeys with them over the years, Danielle has witnessed some of their best and worst moments, and come to admire their resilience and courageous spirit. Danielle introduces us to her patients: Samuel Nwanko, who was brutally attacked by a Nigerian cult in his homeland and is attempting to create a new life in America; Jade Collier, an Aussie who refuses to let a small thing like a wheelchair keep her from being a homegrown ambassador to New York City; Julia Barquero, a Guatemalan woman who migrated to the States to save her disabled son but cannot obtain the lifesaving heart transplant she needs because she is undocumented. We meet a young Muslim woman threatened at knifepoint for wearing her veil, and the spitfire Señora Estrella, one of Danielle's many Spanish-speaking patients, whose torrent of words helps seal Danielle's resolve to improve her own Spanish, an essential skill in today's urban hospitals. And so she, her husband, and their two young children and seventy-five-pound dog relocate to Costa Rica, where they discover potholes the size of their New York City apartment, a casual absence of street signs or even street names, tangy green-skinned limon dulce dangling in the playground, and sudden rains surging over the craggy edges of roadside ditches. Ultimately, Danielle experiences being a patient in a foreign country when she gives birth to their third child, a "Costarricense" girl. With controversy over immigrants in our society escalating, and debate surrounding health-care reform becoming increasingly urgent, Ofri's riveting stories about her patients could not be more timely. Living and dying in the foreign country we call home, they have much to teach us about the American way, in sickness and in health.

In Singular Intimacies, which the New England Journal of Medicine said captured the essence of becoming and being a doctor, Danielle Ofri led us into the hectic, constantly challenging world of big-city medicine. In Incidental Findings, she's finished her training and is learning through practice to become a more rounded healer. The book opens with a dramatic tale of the tables being turned on Dr. Ofri: She's had to shed the precious white coat and credentials she worked so hard to earn and enter her own hospital as a patient. She experiences the real slight prick and pressure of a long needle as well as the very real sense of invasion and panic that routinely visits her patients. These fifteen intertwined tales include Living Will, where Dr. Ofri treats a man who has lost the will to live, and she too comes dangerously close to concluding that he has nothing to live for; Common Ground, in which a patient's difficult decision to have an abortion highlights the vulnerabilities of doctor and patient alike; Acne, where she is confronted by a patient whose physical and emotional abuse she can't possibly heal, so she must settle on treating the one thing she can, the least of her patient's problems; and finally a stunning concluding chapter, Tools of the Trade, where Dr. Ofri's touch is the last in a woman's long life.

In 1997, Stanley B. Prusiner received a Nobel Prize, the world's most prestigious award for achievement in physiology or medicine. That he was the sole recipient of the award for the year was entirely appropriate. His struggle to identify the agent responsible for ravaging the brains of animals suffering from scrapie and mad cow disease, and of humans with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, had been waged largely alone and in some cases in the face of strenuous disagreement. In this book, Prusiner tells the remarkable story of his discovery of prions - infectious proteins that replicate and cause disease but surprisingly contain no genetic material - and reveals how superb and meticulous science is actually practiced with talented teams of researchers who persevere. He recounts the frustrations and rewards of years of research and offers fascinating portraits of his peers as they raced to discover the causes of fatal brain diseases. Prusiner's hypothesis, once considered heresy, now stands as accepted science and the basis for developing diagnoses and eventual cures. He closes with a meditation on the legacy of his discovery: What will it take to cure Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Lou Gehrig's and other devastating diseases of the brain?

The author offers a compilation of personal anecdotes and reflections based on his forty-year career in medicine as he explores various aspects of his discipline, how it is practiced around the globe, the lives of patients, and how the body works.

Relates the life story of Josef Mengele and quotes from the testimonies of twin children who were the victims of his sadistic pseudo-medical experiments in Auschwitz. They speak about the complicated psychological problems which they confronted after the war, and which caused their silence in the 1950s-70s. In 1984 the organization of surviving twins, CANDLES, was established, which organized a trip to Auschwitz in 1985 and publicized their reminiscences.

" Here, in his own words, is the story of one of the twentieth century's most creative medical innovators, Dr. Henry Heimlich. The thoracic surgeon is best known for having developed the Heimlich Maneuver, the world's easiest-to-learn and most universally known method to save people from choking to death on food or foreign objects. But many don't know about Dr. Heimlich's other life-saving inventions. He is the inventor of the Heimlich Chest Drain Valve, which saved thousands of lives during the Vietnam War, and the Heimlich MicroTrach, which provides a remarkably efficient way for people to take oxygen. In the present decade, Dr. Heimlich has turned his attention to two devastating illnesses for which medicine has not yet found a cure--cancer and HIV. He describes his research and its promise, as well as the controversy and resistance his new ideas have generated from the medical establishment. Interweaving the author's personal life with riveting stories of his numerous medical breakthroughs, this rich memoir provides insights into the workings of a creative mind and the machinations of the American medical system."

"Phoning Home is a collection of entertaining and thought-provoking essays featuring the author's quirky family, his Jewish heritage, and his New York City upbringing. Jacob M. Appel's recollections and insights, informed and filtered by his advanced degrees in medicine, law, and ethics, not only inspire nostalgic feelings but also offer insight into contemporary medical and ethical issues. At times sardonic and at others self-deprecating, Appel lays bare the most private aspects of his emotional life. "We'd just visited my grandaunt in Miami Beach, the last time we would ever see her. I had my two travel companions, Fat and Thin, securely buckled into the backseat of my mother's foul-tempered Dodge Dart," writes Appel of his family vacation with his two favorite rubber cat toys. Shortly thereafter Fat and Thin were lost forever--beginning, when Appel was just six years old, what he calls his "private apocalypse." Both erudite and full-hearted, Appel recounts storylines ranging from a bout of unrequited love gone awry to the poignant romance of his grandparents. We learn of the crank phone calls he made to his own family, the conspicuous absence of Jell-O at his grandaunt's house, and family secrets long believed buried. The stories capture the author's distinctive voice--a blend of a physician's compassion and an ethicist's constant questioning. "--

A gripping exploration of the legal and ethical dilemmas in neonatal intensive care—a truly original work. Chosen as an Outstanding Academic Titles in 2003 by Choice Magazine In this new, startlingly original book, John D. Lantos weaves a compelling story that captures the dilemmas of modern medical practice. The Lazarus Case: Life-and-Death Issues in Neonatal Intensive Care begins with a fictional malpractice case—an amalgam of typical cases in which Lantos appeared as an expert witness—and uses it as the framework for addressing the ethical issues surrounding neonatal intensive care. Lantos draws on his experience in neonatal medicine, pediatrics, and medical ethics to explore multiple ethical dilemmas through one poignant representative situation. In Lantos's model case, a doctor decides to stop resuscitation of a premature infant, a tiny "preemie" who seems past reasonable care. The baby survives with severe neurological defects and the parents sue the doctor, alleging that stopping treatment was negligent. From this case, Lantos considers our moral obligations to critically ill babies, the meaning of negligence, and the sorts of social structures that shape the moral consciences of doctors. Each chapter begins with Lantos deposing in the conference room of the plaintiffs' lawyers. The questions put to Lantos throughout the deposition spark an engrossing retelling of his personal experiences with premature babies, as well as his thoughtful discussions of ethics, morality, history, and medical statistics. Sprinkled throughout the book are references to fictional works by Camus, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Twain, and others. Lantos uses these literary examples to further illustrate the ambiguities, misunderstandings, responsibilities, and evasions that plague our decisions regarding life and death, medical care and medical education, and ultimately the cost and value of preserving the lives of the most vulnerable among us.

In this second book of poems, oncologist Marc J. Straus addresses the hopes and the tragedies of his profession. The work is a commentary on his experience in the medical field and a collection of rich, vivid monologues written from the points of view of both doctor and patient. These poems show a rare sensitivity not only to those who are suffering but also to the details that distinguish each life.