What’s in it
Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.
24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThis 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
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
Direct Red: A Surgeon's View of Her Life-or-Death Profession
Gabriel Weston · 205 pages
Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon
Henry Marsh · 271 pages
Traces the author's post-retirement work as a surgeon and teacher in such remote areas as Nepal and Ukraine, illuminating the challenges of working in difficult regions and finding purposeful work after a career.
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
When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi · 256 pages
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve me
The Hospital by the River
Catherine Hamlin, John Little · 320 pages
The Scalpel and the Silver Bear: The First Navajo Woman Surgeon Combines Western Medicine and Traditional Healing
Lori Arviso Alvord, Elizabeth Cohen Van Pelt · 204 pages
No Time to Lose: A Life in Pursuit of Deadly Viruses
Peter Piot · 387 pages
A microbiologist describes his adventure-filled career, discussing his time spent in Central Africa in the 1970s identifying the Ebola virus and his work there again in the 1980s as part of the area's first international AIDS efforts.
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.
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.
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.
Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story
Ben Carson, Cecil Murphey · 224 pages
Ben Carson, M.D., works medical miracles. Today, he's one of the most celebrated neurosurgeons in the world. In Gifted Hands, he tells of his inspiring odyssey from his childhood in inner-city Detroit to his position as director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital at age 33.
In Stitches
Anthony Youn · 271 pages
The celebrity cosmetic surgery blogger describes his misfit youth as a nerdy Korean-American student with a misshapen jaw whose life-changing surgery led him to become a successful plastic surgeon.
Down Among the Dead Men: A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician
Michelle Williams · 262 pages
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.
Becoming Dr. Q: My Journey from Migrant Farm Worker to Brain Surgeon
Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa · 317 pages
Tells the life story of Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa from impoverished childhood in a tiny village in Mexico to illegal immigrant, American citizen, student at the University of California, on to Harvard Medical School, and becoming an internationally renowned neurosurgeon.
On the Move: A Life
Oliver Sacks · 416 pages
An impassioned, tender, and joyous memoir by the author of Musicophilia and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: "Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far." It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On th
The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife's Memoir
Patricia Harman · 290 pages
In Patricia Harman’s exam room, patients open their hearts. Harman, a nurse-midwife, manages a private practice with her husband, an ob-gyn, in Torrington, West Virginia—a practice now providing only gynecological exams and first trimester care because they’ve been forced by escalating malpractice insurance costs to give up delivering babies. Despite this, the women who sit before her receive nurt