Down Among the Dead Men: A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician

This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor

Adam Kay · 278 pages

As soon as Adam Kay set foot on a hospital ward for the first time, he realized there's quite a lot they don't teach you at medical school ... His diaries from the NHS front line - scribbled in secret after long nights, endless days and missed weekends - are hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking by turns. This Is Going to Hurt is everything you wanted to know about being a junior doctor, and mor

Direct Red: A Surgeon's View of Her Life-or-Death Profession

Gabriel Weston · 205 pages

Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery

Henry Marsh · 278 pages

In neurosurgery, more than in any other branch of medicine, the doctor's oath to "do no harm" holds a bitter irony. Operations on the brain carry grave risks. Every day, leading neurosurgeon Henry Marsh must make agonizing decisions, often in the face of great urgency and uncertainty. If you believe that brain surgery is a precise and exquisite craft, practiced by calm and detached doctors, thi

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

Susannah Cahalan · 288 pages

The book narrates Cahalan's issues with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis and the process by which she was diagnosed with this form of encephalitis. She wakes up in a hospital with no memory of the events of the previous month, during which time she would have violent episodes and delusions. Her eventual diagnosis is made more difficult by various physicians misdiagnosing her with several theories s

Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6-September 30, 1945

Michihiko Hachiya · 256 pages

The late Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital when the world's first atomic bomb was dropped on the city. Though his responsibilities in the appalling chaos of a devastated city were awesome, he found time to record the story daily, with compassion and tenderness.

Just Here Trying to Save a Few Lives: Tales of Life and Death from the ER

Pamela Grim · 320 pages

On Call In Hell: A Doctor's Iraq War Story

Richard Jadick, Thomas Hayden · 281 pages

A Journey Round My Skull

Frigyes Karinthy · 288 pages

The author's account of his own life when he was suffeing from a brain tumor.

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

My Lobotomy

Howard Dully, Charles Fleming · 287 pages

At twelve, Howard Dully was guilty of the same crimes as other boys his age: he was moody and messy, rambunctious with his brothers, contrary just to prove a point, and perpetually at odds with his parents. Yet somehow, this normal boy became one of the youngest people on whom Dr. Walter Freeman performed his barbaric transorbital--or ice pick--lobotomy.Abandoned by his family within a year of the

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

Caitlin Doughty · 272 pages

The blogger behind the popular Web series Ask a Mortician describes her experiences working at a crematory, including how she sometimes got ashes on her clothes and how she cared for bodies of all shapes and sizes.

Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

Judy Melinek, T.J. Mitchell · 265 pages

"The fearless memoir of a young forensic pathologist's "rookie season" as a NYC medical examiner, and the cases--hair-raising and heartbreaking and impossibly complex--that shaped her as both a physician and a mother. Just two months before the September 11 terrorist attacks, Dr. Judy Melinek began her training as a New York City forensic pathologist. With her husband T.J. and their toddler Daniel

A Million Little Pieces

James Frey · 430 pages

"The most lacerating tale of drug addiction since William S. Burroughs' Junky." --The Boston Globe"Again and again, the book delivers recollections that leave the reader winded and unsteady. James Frey's staggering recovery memoir could well be seen as the final word on the topic."--San Francisco Chronicle"A brutal, beautifully written memoir."--The Denver Post"Gripping . . . A great story . . . Y

Autobiography of a Face

Lucy Grealy · 230 pages

Lucy Grealy's ruthless self-examination, rich fantasy life, and great derring-do inform this powerful memoir about the premium we put on beauty and on a woman's face in particular. It took Lucy twenty years of living with a distorted self-image and more than thirty reconstructive procedures before she could come to terms with her appearance after childhood surgery left her jaw disfigured. As a you

Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

Miklos Nyiszli · 160 pages

See work: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15671648W

The Hospital: How I Survived the Secret Child Experiments at Aston Hall

Barbara O'Hare · 320 pages

Dwarf: A Memoir of How One Woman Fought for a Body-and a Life-She Was Never Supposed to Have

Tiffanie DiDonato, Rennie Dyball

The Burn Journals

Brent Runyon · 379 pages

BRENT RUNYON WAS 14 years old when he set himself on fire. This is a true story.In The Burn Journals, Runyon describes that devastating suicide attempt and his recovery over the following year. He takes us into the Burn Unit in a children's hospital and through painful burn care and skin-grafting procedures. Then to a rehabilitation hospital, for intensive physical, occupational, and psychological

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Aron Ralston · 368 pages

Hiking into the remote Utah canyonlands, Aron Ralston felt perfectly at home in the beautiful natural world. Then, at 2:41 p.m., eight miles from his truck, in a deep and narrow slot canyon, an eight-hundred-pound boulder tumbled loose, pinning Aron's right hand and wrist against the canyon wall. Through six days of hell, with scant water, food, or warm clothing, and the terrible knowledge that no

Ice Bound: One Woman's Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole

Jerri Nielsen, Maryanne Vollers · 362 pages

A physician stranded at the South Pole describes how she discovered a lump in her breast, treated herself with a biopsy and chemotherapy, and was rescued by the Air National Guard, and reflects on her experiences and her colleagues. The Antarctic winter, with temperatures 100 below zero, shuts supply lines down completely; conditions are too treacherous for planes or boats and the only connection

A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic’s Wild Ride to the Edge and Back

Kevin Hazzard · 261 pages

"A former paramedic's visceral, poignant, and mordantly funny account of a decade spent on Atlanta's mean streets saving lives and connecting with the drama and occasional beauty that lies inside catastrophe. In the aftermath of 9/11 Kevin Hazzard felt that something was missing from his life--his days were too safe, too routine. A failed salesman turned local reporter, he wanted to test himself,

Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart

James R. Doty · 276 pages

The author relates how a chance encounter in a magic shop with a woman who taught him exercises to ease his sufferings and manifest his greatest desires gave him a glimpse of the relationship between the brain and the heart, and drove him to explore the neuroscience of compassion and altruism.

Keeping Hope Alive: One Woman: 90,000 Lives Changed

Hawa Abdi · 246 pages

"The ... memoir of one brave woman who, along with her daughters, has kept tens of thousands of her fellow Somali citizens safe, healthy, and educated for more than twenty years"--Dust jacket flap.

Something for the Pain: Compassion and Burnout in the ER

Paul Austin · 304 pages

In this riveting memoir, an ER doctor reveals how his high-stress career of helping others led to a struggle to save himself.