The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating Heart Cadavers--How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

Atul Gawande · 280 pages

Explores the efforts of physicians to close the gap between best intentions and best performance in the face of insurmountable obstacles, discussing such topics as the ethical considerations of lethal injections, malpractice, and surgical errors.

Polio: An American Story

David M. Oshinsky · 342 pages

[This book] tells the ... story of the polio terror and of the intense effort to find a cure, from the March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines--and beyond.-Dust jacket.

The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery

George Johnson · 284 pages

An exploration of the history and recent advances of cancer research that will challenge everything you thought you knew about the disease.

Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce

Douglas Starr · 456 pages

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

Oliver Sacks · 243 pages

In his most extraordinary book, “one of the great clinical writers of the twentieth century” (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Siddhartha Mukherjee · 571 pages

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer is a book written by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born American physician and oncologist. Published on 16 November 2010 by Scribner, it won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

The Philadelphia Chromosome: A Mutant Gene and the Quest to Cure Cancer at the Genetic Level

Jessica Wapner · 323 pages

This work discusses the history of a genetic mutation, discovered in 1959, that causes chronic myeloid leukemia, and traces the research and breakthroughs that led to the creation of a drug that makes this once-fatal illness now treatable. It focuses on what is widely viewed as the 'poster child' of rational drug development in the cancer research world. The history of the founding of a genetic mu

Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Being Human

Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, Kathryn Bowers · 320 pages

In the tradition of Temple Grandin, Oliver Sacks, and Neil Shubin, cardiologist and psychiatrist Natterson-Horowitz and science writer Bowers look at the remarkable correspondences between the way human beings and animals live, die, get sick, and heal in their natural settings.

The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis

Thomas Goetz · 298 pages

"The riveting history of tuberculosis, the world's most lethal disease, the two men whose lives it tragically intertwined, and the birth of medical science. In 1875, tuberculosis was the deadliest disease in the world, accountable for a third of all deaths. A diagnosis of TB-often called consumption-was a death sentence. Then, in triumph of medical science, a German doctor named Robert Koch deploy

Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: A Renowned Neurologist Explains the Mystery and Drama of Brain Disease

Allan H. Ropper, Brian Burrell · 304 pages

In this book, Dr. Allan Ropper and Brian Burrell take the reader behind the scenes at Harvard Medical School's neurology unit to show how a seasoned diagnostician faces down bizarre, life-altering afflictions.

Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

Sharon Moalem · 279 pages

Survival of the Sickest: The Surprising Connections Between Disease and Longevity is a 2007 New York Times Bestselling science book by Sharon Moalem, an evolutionary biologist and neurogeneticist, and Jonathan Prince, senior advisor and speechwriter for the Clinton administration. It was originally titled, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease.

The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery

D.T. Max · 336 pages

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America

Robert Whitaker · 379 pages

In this astonishing and startling book, award-winning science and history writer Robert Whitaker investigates a medical mystery: Why has the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States tripled over the past two decades? Every day, 1,100 adults and children are added to the government disability rolls because they have become newly disabled by mental illness, with this epidemic spreading m

Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine

Paul A. Offit · 253 pages

"In Bad Faith, acclaimed physician and author Paul Offit gives readers a never-before-seen look into the minds of those who choose to medically martyr themselves, or their children, in the name of religion. Never afraid of controversy, Offit takes a stark and disturbing look at our surprising capacity to risk the health and safety of children in service of our beliefs. He tells the story of two de

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History

John M. Barry · 546 pages

At the height of WWI, history's most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collisio

Five Patients

Michael Crichton · 236 pages

ER is the most successful television series ever. Michael Chrichton created the series from his own experiences as a medical doctor in the emergency rooms and wards of Massachusetts General Hospital. Five Patients is Michael Chrichton’s true account of the real life dramas so vividly portrayed in ER. A construction worker is seriously injured in a scaffold collapse; a middle-aged dispatcher is bro

When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales of Neurosurgery

Frank T. Vertosick Jr. · 272 pages

Neurosurgery is an arrogant and yet intensely humbling occupation. Physicists might distill Creation into a few differential equations and biologists see life's wonders in a DNA helix. Only the neurosurgeon actually touches the fleshy incarnation of Nature's greatest mystery - the human brain - and runs the risks that come with it. The true mystery of neurosurgery lies in the lifelines of surgeon

The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug

Thomas Hager · 340 pages

The Nazis discovered it. The Allies won the war with it. It conquered diseases, changed laws, and single-handedly launched the era of antibiotics. It was sulfa, the first synthetic antibiotic. Science writer Hager chronicles the history of the drug that shaped modern medicine. Sulfa saved millions of lives--among them those of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr.--but even more, it

Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service

Maryn McKenna · 320 pages

In war against diseases, they are the Special Forces. They always keep a bag packed. They seldom have more than twenty-four hours' notice before they are dispatched. The phone calls that tell them to head to the airport, sometimes in the middle of the night, may give them no more information than the country they are traveling to and the epidemic they will tackle when they get there. The universal

Blood and Guts A History of Surgery by Hollingham, Richard

Richard Hollingham · 320 pages

'Blood and Guts' tells the remarkable history of surgery from ancient times onwards. It's an extraordinary story of stolen corpses, medical fraud, lobotomised patients - and every now and then courageous advances that have saved the lives of millions around the world.

Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus

Bill Wasik, Monica Murphy · 288 pages

Charts the history, science, and cultural mythology of rabies, documenting how before its vaccine the disease caused fatal brain infections and sparked the creations of monsters, including werewolves, vampires and zombies.

Phineas Gage: A Gruesome but True Story About Brain Science

John Fleischman · 96 pages

Phineas Gage was truly a man with a hole in his head. Phineas, a railroad construction foreman, was blasting rock near Cavendish, Vermont, in 1848 when a thirteen-pound iron rod was shot through his brain. Miraculously, he survived to live another eleven years and become a textbook case in brain science. At the time, Phineas Gage seemed to completely recover from his accident. He could walk, ta

How Doctors Think

Jerome Groopman · 320 pages

A physician discusses the thought patterns and actions that lead to misdiagnosis on the part of healthcare providers and suggests methods that patients can use to help doctors assess conditions more accurately.

Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

Jo Marchant · 336 pages

"A rigorous, skeptical, deeply reported look at the new science behind the mind's extraordinary ability to heal the body ... While we accept that stress or anxiety can damage our health, the idea of "healing thoughts" was long ago hijacked by New Age gurus and spiritual healers. Recently, however, serious scientists from a range of fields have been uncovering evidence that our thoughts, emotions,