Medical Biography

"I am a doctor." Every year, thousands of medical school graduates utter these four simple words. But as you will hear in Playing God, earning an MD is just the first step to becoming a real physician. In this thrilling and moving memoir, Dr. Anthony Youn reveals that the true metamorphosis from student to doctor occurs not in medical school but in the formative years of residency training and early practice. Here, you will take a journey through the world of surgery, hospitals, and the practice of medicine unlike any that you have traveled before.

In The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the power of speech, the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the...

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.

What is the price of honor? It took 10 years for Vietnam War Nurse Diane Carlson Evans to answer that question - and the answer was a heavy one.

As a medical detective of the modern world, forensic pathologist Ryan Blumenthal’s chief goal is to bring perpetrators to justice. He has performed thousands of autopsies, which have helped bring numerous criminals to book. In Autopsy he covers the hard lessons learnt as a rookie pathologist, as well as some of the most unusual cases he’s encountered. During his career, for example, he has dealt with high-profile deaths, mass disasters, death by lightning and people killed by African wildlife.

Offering examples of how to make medicine better for the healers and those they serve, If I Betray These Words profiles clinicians across the country who are tough, resourceful, and resilient, but feel trapped between the patient-first values of their Hippocratic oath and the business imperatives of a broken healthcare system. If I Betray These Words confronts the threat and broken promises of moral injury—what it is; where it comes from; how it manifests; and who’s fighting back against it. We need better healthcare—for patients and for the workforce. It’s time to act.

Bleeding Truth is the powerful memoir of Dr. Shahram Azam, a former Iranian military physician who risked everything to speak out against state torture and murder. In 2003, while serving at Baghiyatollah Military Hospital in Tehran, Dr. Azam examined the body of Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian-Iranian photojournalist who was arrested for photographing outside Evin Prison. What he saw—evidence of torture, head trauma, and sexual assault—was undeniable. Refusing to remain silent, he fled Iran and exposed the truth to the world.

Out of the crucible of medical training, award-winning writer Terrence Holt shapes this stunning account of residency, the years-long ordeal in which doctors are made. "Amid all the mess and squalor of the hospital, with its blind random unraveling of lives", Internal Medicine finds the compassion from which doctors discover the strength to care.

K. D. Ray’s remarkable journey begins in 1931 with the death of his father, a prominent judge in India. At just eight years old, he returns to his father’s ancestral home with his mother and brother. Defying the family matriarch, his mother is cut off from the inheritance, but with the support of other family members, they settle into a modest new community. It becomes clear that education is his path to independence in a rapidly changing world.

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.

Families are riddled with untold secrets. But Stephen Hinshaw never imagined that a profound secret was kept under lock and key for 18 years within his family - that his father's mysterious absences, for months at a time, resulted from serious mental illness and involuntary hospitalizations. From the moment his father revealed the truth, during Hinshaw's first spring break from college, he knew his life would change forever.

Kristine Barnett’s son Jacob has an IQ higher than Einstein’s, a photographic memory, and he taught himself calculus in two weeks. At nine he started working on an original theory in astrophysics that experts believe may someday put him in line for a Nobel Prize, and at age twelve he became...

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.

Following Kate Marshall’s first year in the mortuary at a north of England NHS hospital, with each month exploring the people she meets, in life and death, as well as her own growing awareness of life behind the veil. Sorry for Your Loss is haunting, uplifting and informative, with many moments of laughter, and shows us that the way we approach death can make life all the more precious.

A pediatric oncologist and palliative care physician Dr. Adam B. Hill suffers stress and disillusionment with the culture of medicine. It led him to alcoholism, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Then, while in recovery, he loses a mentor to suicide, revealing the extent of the burnout epidemic in the medical field.

When a sudden onset of manic episodes lands her in a psychiatric ward, what is an established, respected psychotherapist to do? With an otherwise firm sense of self and an openness to new insights, Berger confronts the stumbling blocks of shame and stigma. A series of close friends and mentors stand by her through challenges with abusive colleagues, conflicted relationships with men, estrangement from her mother, and confusion about what truly matters.

Dresden 1893: Der ehrgeizige Jurist Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber erleidet nach einer beruflichen Beförderung einen Nervenzusammenbruch. Im darauffolgenden stationären Aufenthalt entwirft Schreber eine Erklärungsschrift, welche seine Mündigkeit wiederherstellen soll und liefert damit ein umfangreiches, unmittelbares Zeugnis eines an paranoider Schizophrenie Erkrankten.

Can the mind be explained by what we know about the brain? Is a person’s being determined by their body alone or by their mind and body as separate elements? In this incisive and engaging book, Wilder Penfield, whose work pioneered such research, shares insights into these and other questions, providing an in-depth look at the function of the brain and its relationship to the action of the mind.

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER. A GLOBE AND MAIL READER'S FAVOURITE. Winner of a 2025 Silver Nautilus Award. A harrowing but ultimately uplifting memoir about living with borderline personality disorder—the most stigmatized diagnosis in mental health. “I didn’t know whether to take you to a...

A scorchingly frank look at how doctors are made, bringing readers into the critical care unit to see one burgeoning physician's journey from ineptitude to competence. In medical school, Matt McCarthy dreamed of being a different kind of doctor—the sort of mythical, unflappable physician who...