Medical Memoirs

Considering herself unsuitable for any other contribution to the war effort, Monica Dickens opts for nursing, imagining herself gliding through the wards, serene in a pure white halo cap. On enrolment, however, she is promptly stripped of all illusions. Intelligent and headstrong, Monica struggles to submit to the iron rule of the Matron and toils over the mountains of menial work that are a trainee's lot. But there are friends among the staff and patients, night-time escapades to dances with dashing army men and her secret writing project to keep her going.

How does one begin to treat such cases, to counsel people whose lives may be changed forever? How does one train the next generation of clinicians to deal with the moral and medical aspects of brain disease? Dr. Ropper and his colleague answer these questions by taking the listener into a rarified world where lives and minds hang in the balance.

In The Song of Our Scars, physician Haider Warraich offers a bold reexamination of the nature of pain, not as a simple physical sensation, but as a cultural experience. Warraich, himself a sufferer of chronic pain, considers the ways our notions of pain have been shaped not just by science but by politics and power, by whose suffering mattered and whose didn’t.

Gary Ludwig has been a firefighter/paramedic for 37 years and has worked in two of the most violent cities in the United States (St. Louis and Memphis) for 34 years of those years. He gathers his experiences in this field and presents an honest overview of his experiences with the emotions, feelings, sights, and gut-wrenching efforts men and women in this field experience to save a life or property. This is the insider look at a profession few of us fully appreciate: This book gains the profession the respect that is due.

Dean Braxton was hospitalized due to kidney stones. The procedure to break down the stones caused an infection which eventually made his heart stop. When Dean died, he was taken to heaven, where he met Jesus, family members, and saw God, the father of creation! He should have been a vegetable or dead, when in fact Dean Braxton's heart had been stopped for 1 hour and 45 minutes. After he came back from heaven, he was instantly healed of 29 medical conditions, and today he is called the Miracle Man, and has written a book of his complete account of heaven in the afterlife.

Freedom 55? The so-called “Golden Years”? What if you are slowly losing your memories and your motor skills? Or what if you are the devastated witness as your partner struggles with dementia? Lewy Body Disease is a form of dementia second only to Alzheimer’s in numbers, yet many doctors and almost no lay people have ever heard its name. This is the story of two courageous people, Julie and Ken Sobol, life partners as well as writing partners. Caught up in the frightening and fatal fog of Lewy Body Disease, they started writing this book together.

La lecture pince-sans-rire de Jean-Marc Galéra donne vie aux tribulations d'un légiste attachant. Michel Sapanet manie le scalpel, l'écarteur et l'humour à froid. Une nécessité dans son métier : il est médecin. Mais aucune chance qu'il guérisse ses patients, ils sont déjà morts. Le travail du légiste s'apparente plus à celui de l'enquêteur : faire parler la victime. Et pour cela il inspecte les chairs, les cœurs, les cerveaux. Sa vie, c'est la mort. Il la côtoie, la tutoie, lui extirpe la vérité. Pour nous la livrer dans ses saisissantes chroniques.

Dieses Buch deckt eine der größten Lügen dieser Welt auf, die weder vom Mainstream noch von der alternativen Szene thematisiert wird. Die Viruslüge ist nicht nur eine Abrechnung mit der todbringenden Schulmedizin, sondern auch mit den Ärzten des Widerstands, die nach wie vor an der Keimtheorie festhalten, mit der wir seit über 150 Jahren belogen werden. Alternative Ansätze, die im Gegensatz zur Schulmedizin das Bewusstsein mit einbeziehen, wie die Germanische Heilkunde, werden von den bekannten Ärzten des Widerstands bis heute ignoriert.

A decade after World War II, there was still no such thing as open-heart surgery, and yet half a million Americans were dying from heart disease every year. After the first daring operation in 1954 and through the next three decades, five heroic surgeons braved the scorn of their peers, withstood fierce desperation, and faced possible death in order to devise procedures that would save overwhelming numbers of those doomed children and provide hope for a new life to all manner of heart-failing individuals.

Dr. Michael Baden has been involved in some of the most high-profile civil rights and police brutality cases in United States history, from the government's 1976 re-investigation of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the 2014 death of Michael Brown, whose case sparked the initial Ferguson protests that grew into the Black Lives Matter movement. The playbook hasn't changed since 1979, when Dr. Baden was demoted from his job as New York City's Chief Medical Examiner after ruling that the death of a Black man in police custody was a homicide.

Chi era Enzo Piccinini, medico chirurgo tragicamente scomparso in un incidente stradale nel maggio 1999, amico di don Luigi Giussani e instancabile educatore? A rispondere, a 25 anni dalla morte, è Pier Paolo Bellini, amico e compagno di strada del medico reggiano, insieme a Chiara Piccinini, una delle figlie di Enzo, dando voce all'uomo, alle sue opere e alle parole che hanno segnato la vita di molti.

At the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Joshua Mezrich creates life from loss, transplanting organs from one body to another. In this intimate, profoundly moving work, he illuminates the extraordinary field of transplantation that enables this kind of miracle to happen every day.

Most would not expect a book about a stroke to be entertaining, but this memoir will force you to laugh through a tragedy, then cry, then laugh again. Avrel Seale was fifty, did not smoke or drink, had low blood pressure, and had hiked more than two hundred miles the year a stroke nearly ended his life. In an instant, he was teleported into the body of an old man—unbalanced, shaky, spastic, and half-paralyzed. Overnight, he was plunged into a world of brain surgeons, nurses, insurance case managers, and an abundance of therapists.

Over the next ten years, 40 to 60 million people in this country will be admitted to the ICU. Most of these hospitalizations will be sudden, unexpected, and harrowing experiences that can alter patients and their families physically and emotionally, with effects that endure for years. In this rich blend of science, medical history, profoundly humane patient stories, and personal reflection, Dr. Wes Ely describes his mission to prevent patients from being inadvertently harmed by the technology that is keeping them alive.

Switching Time is the first story centering on multiple personality disorder to be told by the treating physician. It is the incredible saga of a young woman stranded in unimaginable darkness who, in order to survive, created 17 different versions of herself. One by one, Karen's "alters" began showing themselves: men, women, young boys, a toddler, black, white, vicious, nurturing, prim, licentious. And their "stepping out" confronted Baer with the challenge of a lifetime.

We have lost the war on cancer. We spend $150 billion each year treating it, yet - a few innovations notwithstanding - a patient with cancer is as likely to die of it as one was 50 years ago. Most new drugs add mere months to one's life at agonizing physical and financial cost. In The First Cell, Azra Raza offers a searing account of how both medicine and our society (mis)treats cancer, how we can do better, and why we must.

Horrifying, heartbreaking and eye-opening, these are the stories, the patients and the cases that have characterised a career spent behind bars. The no-holds-barred memoirs of a GP who went from working at a quiet suburban practice to treating the country’s most dangerous criminals - first in young offenders’ institutions, then at the notorious Wormwood Scrubs and finally at Europe’s largest women-only prison in Europe, Bronzefield.

The technology invented by psychiatrist Robert G. Heath at Tulane University in 1950s and 60s has been described as one of "the most controversial yet largely undocumented experiments in US history" - controversial to us because Heath's patients included incarcerated convicts and gay men to be 'cured' of their sexual preference; controversial in its day because his work was allegedly part of MKUltra, the CIA's notorious "mind control" project. As a result, Heath's cutting-edge research and legacy were put under lock and key, buried in Tulane's archives.

The story of two outsiders and obsessives whose collision prompted an evangelistic alliance on the furthest frontiers of underground music. Steve Davis first met Kavus Torabi - guitarist with Gong, Guapo, Cardiacs and Knifeworld - in the mid-2000s at a gig by French underground rock legends Magma. Over the next few years, this unlikely duo's shared affinity for visionary psychedelic music would become the foundation of not only a firm friendship, but also the most infectiously inclusive broadcasting style since the much-mourned death of John Peel.

Narrated by the author, Diane Wilson shares her journey through random and sometimes humorous events of having an invisible illness, how her brain kept this injury even from herself, the loss of focus and sense of self, an obsession with day trading retirement funds, and the alternative therapies that helped heal her brain—a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh, acupuncture, learning to sing, and, most centrally, neurofeedback.