Medical Biography

In Voicemails from My Sister, author Kate Russell explores her sister Sibby's bipolar schizoaffective disorder through true stories that illustrate the disease and how medication both helped and hindered its progress. From her mother's drug use during pregnancy, which led to an incomplete diagnosis, to Sibby's current mental status, as a 37-year-old ward of the state, Kate breaks down her sister's disease by highlighting events that contributed to the uprise and decline of her well-being.

A Life in Trauma is a frank, remarkable account of a career spent helping others, offering a positive outlook on the potential of Ireland’s healthcare system in the future. Concern. Compassion. Doubt. Despair. Anger. Hope. Imagine juggling these feelings every day in a situation where your work could mean the difference between someone's life or death.

Unlocking My Brain: Through the Labyrinth of Acquired Brain Injury brings to life Christine's personal experience of brain injury - from losing her vision and being unable to walk, talk or write, Christine regained her life, her thoughts and her career. In 1991, Christine was involved in a horrific car accident and suffered extensive injuries including Acquired Brain Injury (ABI). Unlocking My Brain shows the incredible plasticity of the human brain as well as the plasticity of the human spirit.

A moving memoir and an extraordinary love story that shows how an expert physician became a family caregiver and learned why care is so central to all our lives and yet is at risk in today's world. When Dr. Arthur Kleinman, an eminent Harvard psychiatrist and social anthropologist, began caring...

The Headache Godfather traces the life of Seymour Diamond, MD, who was born in 1925, the son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Slovakia, in Chicago, Illinois. Dr. Diamond revolutionized the practice of headache as a medical specialty when he opened the United States' first private headache practice, the Diamond Headache Clinic, in 1974. It quickly became a headache haven for sufferers from around the world.

When American saxophonist and social activist Fred Ho was diagnosed with stage 3b colo-rectal cancer in 2006 he underwent immediate surgery to remove the tumor and began preparing for chemotherapy. Within days his friends mobilized to arrange grocery deliveries, transport, companionship, and housekeeping duties - they called themselves “Warriors for Fred”. Fred chose to write his astonishing cancer memoir as a diary, acknowledging that all the greatest warriors wrote daily diaries.

My editor had ok'd the story, "The Unveiling of a Quack", and now I faced the man whom the power of the press would squash like a bug. "Five times," he said quietly in response to my question, "the Medical Society of the County of New York sent a committee here to investigate my methods. I let them see patients, X-rays, records, everything." "And what were the results of those investigations?"

Does your blood pressure surge if the car in front of you turns without signaling? Do your neck veins pulsate when a cashier takes too long to ring you up? Does relaxing seem like it'll have to wait until you're dead? Then your name could very well be Brian Frazer. On paper, Frazer is the world's healthiest guy. He eats right, exercises regularly, gets plenty of sleep, has never smoked and has missed only one day of flossing in the last five years. But inside he's a swirling vortex of angst, capable of contracting a new malady every month.

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.

A 23-year veteran of emergency medical services, paramedic Matthew Sias took a detour in his career to pursue the death-care business and found a complementarity between two seemingly divergent careers. Silent Siren: Memoirs of a Life Saving Mortician is the record of some of the more memorable calls he has responded to through the years.

For a long time, when people asked Dr. Meera Shah what she did, she would tell them she was a doctor and leave it at that. "I'm an abortion provider," she will now say. And an interesting thing started to happen each time she met someone new. One by one, people would confide that in fact they'd had an abortion themselves. And the refrain was often the same: You're the only one I've told. This book collects those stories as they've been told to Shah to humanize abortion and to combat myths that persist in the discourse that surrounds it.

Chad shares the highs, the lows, and everything in between during his career as a paramedic, as well as the personal highs and lows. His stories highlight the dance between being fine, and burning out, as well as how the system fails to serve those who have dedicated their lives and careers to serving others.

When Tony Moretti began caring for his Parkinson’s-stricken father, Vince, he thought, How hard could this be? But as the years mounted and Vince’s symptoms progressed, Tony found himself floundering on a monumental journey . . . and there were no answers at the back of the proverbial book. With the support of his wife, their four adult kids, and his three out-of-town siblings (Team Vince!), Tony followed his instincts while navigating Vince’s ever-shifting needs, HMO foibles, and his own father-son baggage.

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.

Two families came together in the waiting room of a Denver hospital on May 11, 2004, to await kidney transplants for loved ones. In the first operation, Gregg Farber, 32, a real estate executive, donated a kidney to his father, Steve, a 60-year-old Denver lawyer and power broker. In the second, Guatemalan refugee and landscaper Ernesto Delaroca, also 32, donated a kidney to his sister Sandra, 19, a restaurant worker.

A week after her 41st birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, pro-pain "dolorists", and the many little murders of capitalism.

When North Korean forces invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, Otto Apel was a surgical resident living in Cleveland, Ohio, with his wife and three young children. A year later he was chief surgeon of the 8076th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, constantly near the front lines in Korea. Immediately upon arriving in camp, Apel performed 80 hours of surgery. His feet swelled so badly, he had to cut his boots off, and he saw more surgical cases in those three and a half days than he would have in a year back in Cleveland.

After years of prosecuting hard-core criminals, rising legal star Alan Bell took a private sector job in South Florida's newest skyscraper. Suddenly, he suffered such bizarre medical symptoms, doctors suspected he'd been poisoned by the Mafia. Bell's rapidly declining health forced him to flee his glamorous Miami life to a sterile "bubble" in the remote Arizona desert.

In 2002, at age 28, David MacLean woke up in a foreign land with his memory wiped clean. No money. No passport. No identity. Taken to a mental hospital by the police, MacLean then started to hallucinate so severely he had to be tied down. Soon he could remember song lyrics and scenes from television shows but not his family, his friends, or the woman he loved. All of these symptoms, it turned out, were the result of the commonly prescribed malarial medication he was taking. Upon hisreturn to the States, he struggled to piece together the fragments of his former life in a harrowing, absurd, and unforgettable journey back to himself.

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.