Weekends at Bellevue: Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psych E.R.

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

Sometimes Amazing Things Happen: Heartbreak and Hope on the Bellevue Hospital Psychiatric Prison Ward

Elizabeth Ford · 272 pages

Welcome to the Bellevue Hospital Psychiatric Prison Ward, a maximum-security hospital and inpatient psychiatric unit for the inmates of the New York City jail system, with its hub on Rikers Island. It is a world of heartbreak, violence, and pain, where severely ill men are often lost in a tangle of courts, jails, and bureaucracy. It is also a place of challenges, redemption, and surprising joy, wh

Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

Flora Rheta Schreiber · 460 pages

This is the amazing story of a woman who lived with 16 different personalities. Here is the unbelievable yet true story of Sybil Dorsett, a survivor of terrible childhood abuse who as an adult was a victim of sudden and mysterious blackouts. What happened during those blackouts has made Sybil's experience one of the most famous psychological cases in the world.

Prozac Nation

Elizabeth Wurtzel · 336 pages

Full of promise is how anyone would have described Elizabeth Wurtzel at age ten, a bright-eyed little girl who painted, wrote stories, and excelled in every way. By twelve she was cutting her legs in the girls' bathroom and listening to scratchy recordings of the Velvet Underground. College was marked by a series of breakdowns, suicide attempts, and hospitalizations before she was finally given P

Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin

Norah Vincent · 285 pages

The journalist who famously lived as a man commits herself—literallyNorah Vincent's New York Times bestselling book, Self-Made Man, ended on a harrowing note. Suffering from severe depression after her eighteen months living disguised as a man, Vincent felt she was a danger to herself. On the advice of her psychologist she committed herself to a mental institution. Out of this raw and overwhelming

The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly: A Physician's First Year

Matt McCarthy · 336 pages

"This funny, candid memoir about the author's intern year at a New York hospital provides a scorchingly frank look at how doctors are made, taking readers into the critical care unit to see one burgeoning physician's journey from ineptitude to competence. After his professional baseball career failed to launch, Matt McCarthy went to Harvard Medical School and on to a coveted residency slot in New

Falling into the Fire

Christine Montross

Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue

Danielle Ofri · 251 pages

Singular Intimacies is the story of becoming a doctor by immersion at New York's Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the country-and perhaps the most legendary. It is both the classic inner-city hospital and a unique amalgam of history, insanity, beauty, and intellect. When Danielle Ofri enters the doors of this 250-year-old institution as a tentative medical student, she is immediate

Intern: A Doctor's Initiation

Sandeep Jauhar · 320 pages

Intern is Dr. Sandeep Jauhar's story of his days and nights in residency at a busy hospital in New York City, a trial that led him to question his every assumption about medical care today. Residency―and especially its first year, the internship―is legendary for its brutality, and Jauhar's experience was even more harrowing than most. He switched from physics to medicine in order to follow a mo

Girl, Interrupted

Susanna Kaysen · 168 pages

In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele--Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles--as for its progressive methods of treating those who could

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.

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,

Yes Sister, No Sister: My Life as a Trainee Nurse in 1950s Yorkshire

Jennifer Craig · 251 pages

Based on the author's own experiences, this is the fascinating story of one young nurse who enters training in 1952 and eventually progresses to become ward sister.

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 Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness

Lori Schiller, Amanda Bennett · 288 pages

Run, Don't Walk: The Curious and Chaotic Life of a Physical Therapist Inside Walter Reed Army Medical Center

Adele Levine · 348 pages

"M*A*S*H meets Scrubs in a sharply observant, absurdly funny, inspiring, and totally unique debut memoir from a physical therapist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the birthplace of physical therapy and the world leader in prosthetic rehabilitation for injured war veterans"--

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

Anne Fadiman · 341 pages

When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos. Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their

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

Crazy All the Time: On The Psych Ward of Bellevue Hospital

Frederick L. Covan · 282 pages

Crazy All the Time is the story of psychotherapy in the real world. Dr. Frederick L. Covan, chief psychologist at Bellevue Hospital, offers a vivid portrait - compassionate, insightful, and humorous - of life on the inside of the combat zone that is the psych ward. In this colorful and irresistibly readable book he tracks the progress of a group of psychology interns who confront an array of pati

In the Midst of Life

Jennifer Worth · 427 pages

Just as Jennifer was present at the beginning of life in her midwife books, here she documents her experiences as a nurse and ward sister treating patients who were nearing the end of their lives. Interpersed with these stories from Jennifer's post-midwife career are the histories of her patients, discussions on the circumstances in which we die, and a stripping-back of the myths and taboos surrou

A Not Entirely Benign Procedure: Four Years as a Medical Student

Perri Klass · 279 pages

Healing Hearts: A Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon

Kathy Magliato · 261 pages

An inspiring, surprising, and deeply informative memoir of the high-stakes life of a female heart surgeon.

On Call: A Doctor's Days and Nights in Residency

Emily R. Transue · 249 pages

The story of a medical resident's initiation into her first three years as a doctor follows her internship in a Seattle hospital, where she experiences first-hand the triumphs and challenges of rescuing and losing patients.

Tell Me Where It Hurts: A Day of Humor, Healing, and Hope in My Life as an Animal Surgeon

Nick Trout · 287 pages

It's 2:47 a.m. when Dr. Nick Trout takes the phone call that starts another hectic day at the Angell Animal Medical Center. Sage, a ten-year old German shepherd, will die without emergency surgery for a serious stomach condition. Over the next twenty-four hours Dr. Trout fights for Sage's life, battles disease in the operating room, unravels tricky diagnoses, reassures frantic pet parents, and ref