Medical Memoirs

Dr. Michael Lewis is a family physician and has spent the last 20 years honing his skills. Recognized as an expert in the field, he has been invited to be on local and international news (TV and radio). He is married and has one awesome kid!

In this debut collection of essays, Pace tells of his years as a career paramedic—wandering through the highs and the lows, the saves and the losses, the patients he remembers, and the ones he tries to forget. In 1997, Pace began his career as an EMT because he wanted to do something exciting. He wanted to help people too. And he thought those two things—excitement and helping people—would exist hand in hand. With a little sprinkle of glory thrown in for good measure.

One day in 2002 the 50-year old body of former Pittsburgh Steeler and hall of famer Mike Webster was laid on a cold table in front of pathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu. Webster's body looked to Omalu like the body of a much older man, and the circumstances of his behavior prior to his death were clouded in mystery. But when Omalu cut into Webster's brain, it appeared to be normal. Something didn't add up.

An Epidemic of Absence asks what will happen in developing countries, which, as they become more affluent, have already seen an uptick in allergic disease: Will India end up more allergic than Europe? Velasquez-Manoff also details a controversial underground movement that has coalesced around the treatment of immune-mediated disorders with parasites. Against much of his better judgment, he joins these do-it-yourselfers and reports his surprising results.

Christine Montross was a nervous first-year medical student, standing outside the anatomy lab on her first day of class, preparing herself for what was to come. Entering a room with stainless-steel tables topped by corpses in body bags is shocking, no matter how long you've prepared yourself, but a strange thing happened when Montross met her cadaver.

Are you looking for inspiration? Living is the inspiring true story of a father of seven facing cancer with grace.

In Custody MD: Fighting for the Woo, Dr. Adwoafuaa Nwokocha delivers a raw, gripping memoir chronicling her descent into the high-stakes hell of family court. What begins as a love story between two med school students unravels into a devastating custody battle against her ex-husband—an elite cardiac surgeon with the money, lawyers, and manipulative tactics to weaponize the legal system. Told with vulnerability, humor, and razor-sharp clarity, this book is far more than a courtroom drama. It's a powerful indictment of how race, gender, and power intersect in modern custody disputes.

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.

New Year's Eve 2020 was supposed to be a turning point to better days for twenty-nine-year-old Katie Coleman. Instead, she found herself in the ER processing the earth-shattering news of a stage IV cancer diagnosis, one that had come after years of being assured she was "too young for cancer" and a repeated misdiagnosis of anxiety. Too Young for Cancer tells the story of Katie's journey from diagnosis with an ultra-rare cancer through treatment, recovery, and a life-altering shift in perspective.

Em Medicina dos horrores, a historiadora Lindsey Fitzharris narra como era o chocante mundo da cirurgia do século XIX, que estava às vésperas de uma profunda transformação. A autora evoca os primeiros anfiteatros de operações—lugares abafados onde os procedimentos eram feitos diante de plateias lotadas—e cirurgiões pioneiros, cujo ofício era saudado não pela precisão, mas pela velocidade e pela força bruta, uma vez que não havia anestesia. Não à toa, os mais célebres cirurgiões da época eram capazes de amputar uma perna em menos de trinta segundos.

Ein Moment im Leben, der alles veränderte – live im Fernsehen. Mario D. Richardt wurde vor laufenden Kameras mit einer uncharmanten Aussage konfrontiert: Du hast ja ganz schön zugenommen! Dieser peinliche Augenblick entpuppte sich als Wendepunkt in Marios Leben. Warum nahm er stetig zu, obwohl er seine Essgewohnheiten nicht verändert hatte? Die Diagnose Insulinresistenz trifft ihn wie ein Blitz aus heiterem Himmel. Und er ist nicht allein: Ein erheblicher Anteil der übergewichtigen Menschen kämpft mit diesem Problem.

This is not just a memoir of a distinguished orthopedic surgeon. It is a blueprint for a life of purpose. Mark’s story reminds us that medicine is not just about fixing what’s broken—it’s about honoring what’s human. He shows us how to lead with humility, how to teach with integrity, and how to serve with empathy. He reminds us that the best physicians are also philosophers, that the best leaders are also listeners, and that the best legacies are built not in titles or accolades, but in the lives we touch.

For centuries, the human heart seemed beyond our understanding: an inscrutable shuddering mass that was somehow the driver of emotion and the seat of the soul. As cardiologist and best-selling author Sandeep Jauhar tells in The Heart, it was only recently that we demolished age-old taboos and devised the transformative procedures that changed the way we live. Deftly alternating between historical episodes and his own work, Jauhar tells the colorful and little known story of the doctors who risked their careers and the patients who risked their lives to know and heal our most vital organ.

The search to find medicines is as old as disease, which is to say as old as the human race. Through serendipity - by chewing, brewing, and snorting - some Neolithic souls discovered opium, alcohol, snakeroot, juniper, frankincense, and other helpful substances. Ötzi the Iceman, the 5,000-year-old hunter frozen in the Italian Alps, was found to have whipworms in his intestines and Bronze Age medicine, a worm-killing birch fungus, knotted to his leggings.

G. Wayne Miller has dramatically and meticulously reconstructed an amazing true story: how a group of renegade Minnesota surgeons, led by Dr. Walt Lillehei, made medical history by becoming the first doctors to operate deep inside the human heart.

A Different Face of War is a riveting account of one American officer in the Medical Service Corps during the early years of the Vietnam War. Assigned as the senior medical advisor to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam in I Corps, near the DMZ, James G. Van Straten traveled extensively and interacted with military officers and non-commissioned officers, peasant-class farmers, Buddhist bonzes, shopkeepers, nurses, the mentally ill, and even political operatives. He sent his wife daily letters from July 1966 through June 1967, describing in impressive detail his experiences, and those letters became the primary source for his memoir.

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.

In a blue-collar Michigan town where corporal punishment was seen as positive parenting, troubled families rarely sought professional help. But Michael Grossman’s teachers sent him to see a Freudian psychoanalyst at age 7. It was the first of a parade of therapies that would include Rogerian bear-hugs, Gestalt dream analysis, Rolfing, Bioenergetics and even LSD. Sitting beside Michael on a succession of “shrinks’” couches, the listener follows his progress through one defense after another until he finally achieves a joyful capacity to care for others.

La ciencia responde a la pregunta más antigua: ¿Qué hay después de la vida? Durante cinco años, la Dra. Cristina Lázaro entrevistó a personas que han experimentado experiencias cercanas a la muerte (ECM), desvelando los misterios del más allá. Después de la vida explora estas vivencias desde una perspectiva científica y rigurosa, ofreciendo relatos detallados, análisis expertos y un recorrido antropológico por diferentes culturas. Un libro imprescindible para comprender nuestra existencia, nuestro origen y nuestro destino final. Sobre Cristina Lázaro La Dra.

“Strokes are the third-leading cause of death in America, and for the ‘lucky’ stroke victims who don’t die, about half will spend the rest of their lives trying to recover.” Roughly 700,000 American suffer a stroke each year and around 140,000 of them are fatal. Different Strokes is an in-depth look at what surviving, or not surviving, a stroke can mean.