Recommended Readings

Recommended Readings from Students, Staff, and Faculty
Summaries for all books listed below were obtained from their book covers.

Complications: a Surgeons Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande

• Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside with one’s own eyes. This book is exploratory surgery on medicine itself, lying bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is –complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human. Atul Gawande offers an unflinching view from the scalpel’s edge, where science is ambiguous, information in limited, the stakes are high, yet decisions must be made. In dramatic and revealing stories of patients and doctors, he explores how deadly mistakes occur and why good surgeons go bad. He shows what happens when medicine comes up against the inexplicable: an architect with incapacitating back pain for which there is no physical cause; a young women with nausea that won’t go away; a television newscaster whose blushing is so severe that she cannot do her job. And in a richly detailed portrait of both the people and the science, Gawande also ponders the human factor that makes saving lives possible. At once tough-minded and humane, Complications is a new kind of medical writing, nuanced and lucid, unafraid to confront the conflicts and uncertainties that lie at the heart of modern medicine, yet always alive to the possibilities of wisdom in the extraordinary endeavor.

Incidental Findings: Lessons from My Patients in the Art of Medicine by Danielle Ofri

• These fifteen intertwined tales follow acclaimed physician and award-winning writer Danielle Ofri as she travels beyond the walls of New York’s legendary Bellevue Hospital to rural communities, small towns, and eventually back to hectic, challenging world of inner-city medicine. Along the way, she deals with the pit falls and triumphs of the daily world of medical practice. In the course of treating patients- who range from the terminally ill to manipulative hypochondriacs from veiled Bangladeshi women to convicted felons-Ofri comes to understand that the most important tool in the trade of healing is literally and figuratively the act of reaching out to the patients, of treating patients with empathy and compassion, of looking beyond the illness to see the whole person, their family, and their world. 

The Real Life of a Pediatrician by Dr. Perri Klass

• When children are ill, so much can be at stake. The Real Life of a Pediatrician spotlights the doctors who have devoted their careers to treating the littlest patients. From medical students to experienced doctors, from private practitioners to emergency room specialists, these doctors share the unique joys and challenges of pediatrics. In The Real Life of a Pediatrician, renowned pediatrician and writer Perri Klass introduces a compelling candid collection of stories from these specialists. Whether you’re a pediatrician yourself, are considering the medical field as a career, or are simply interested in the doctors who treat our children, this collection of stories offer unprecedented insight into the everyday lives of these caregivers. Sometimes heartbreaking, always candid, these fascinating first-person narratives highlight the intersection of the professional and the personal.

Caring for the Country by Howard K. Rabinowitz

• This distinct book profiles ten graduates from the Physician Shortage Area Program (PSAP) of Jefferson Medical College, Thomas Jefferson University, who are now practicing family medicine in small rural towns, Author Howard K. Rabinowitz, MD, Director of the PSAP, invites pre-med undergraduates, medical students, residents, and family Physicians to read compelling stories of these doctors, who enjoy rich and fulfilling relationships with their patients and their communities. Providing important insights for those interested in addressing the rural physician shortage, and an excellent recourse for pre-med and medical advisors, the text brings into focus the true calling of medicine-making a difference by helping others. The book opens by discussing the impact of the PSAP, one of the nation’s most successful programs in increasing the supply of rural physicians. In depth profiles reveal the everyday reality of practicing family medicine in small towns through poignant stories and candid dialogue. They cover the spectrum of social and professional issues that rural family doctors face, addressing topics such as the scope of rural family practice, the roles of medical schools and hospital systems, health care policy, rural obstetrics, and telemedicine. The concluding chapter summarizes the professional and personal lessons learned and outlines the future of the field. Anyone with an interest in the unique rewards and challenges of rural medicine will enjoy this enlightening read!

Gifted Hands by Dr. Ben Carson

• 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. Ben Carson is a role model for anyone who attempts the seemingly impossible as he takes you into the operating room where he has saved countless lives. Filled with fascinating case histories, this is the dramatic and intimate story of Ben Carson’s struggle to beat the odds-and of the faith and genius that make him one of the greatest life-givers of the century.

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston

• A highly infectious, deadly virus from the central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days, 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret Military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic “hot” virus. The Hot Zone tells this dramatic story, giving a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their “crashes” into the human race. Shocking, frightening, and impossible to ignore, The Hot Zone proves that truth really is scarier than fiction.

My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult

• Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions, and shots so that her older sister, Kate, can somehow fight her leukemia that has plagued her since childhood. The product of preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Anna was conceived as a bone marrow match for Kate-a life and a role that she has never challenged . . . until now. Like most teenagers, she has always been defined in terms of her sister-and so Anna makes a decision that for most would be unthinkable, a decision that will tear her family apart and have perhaps fatal consequences for the sister she loves. A provocative novel that raises some important ethical issues My Sister’s Keeper is the story of one family’s struggle at all human costs and a stunning moral parable for all time.

Stiff by Mary Roach

• Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies’ postmortem. For two thousand years, cadavers-some willingly, some unwillingly-have been involved in science’s boldest and weirdest undertakings. In this fascinating account. Mary Roach visits the good deeds of cadavers over the centuries and tells the engrossing story of our bodies when we are no longer with them.

Another Day in the Frontal Lobe by Katrina Firlik 

• Katrina Firlik is a neurosurgeon, one of only two hundred or so women among the alpha males who dominate this high-pressure, high-prestige profession. She is also a superbly gifted writer-witty, insightful, at once deeply humane and refreshingly wry. Dr. Firlik draws on this rare combination to create a unique memoir of her compelling experiences. From OR theatrics to thorny ethical questions, from the surprisingly primitive tools in a neurosurgeon’s kit to glimpses of future techniques like the “brainlift”, Firlik cracks open medicine’s most distinguished and secretive specialty. Candid, smart, clear-eyed, and showcasing vivid portrayals of Firlik’s most memorable cases, Another Day in the Frontal Lobe is a mesmerizing glimpse into a world of incredible competition and incalculable rewards.

Critical by Robin Cook

• Angela Dawson, M.D., appears to have it all at age thirty-seven, she owns a fabulous New York City apartment and a stunning seaside house on Nantucket, and enjoys the perks of her prosperous lifestyle. But her climb to the top has been rough, marked by a troubled childhood, a failed marriage, and devastating blow of bankruptcy as a primary-care internist. Painfully aware of the role of economics in the health-care field,  Angela returns to school to earn an MBA; she is determined to erase the memories of the controlling men in her past. Armed with a shiny new degree and blessed with the tenacity, intelligence, and impeccable timing, Angela finds a start-up, Angela’s Healthcare, and then prepares to take it public. With a controlling interest in these busy specialty hospitals in New York City and plans for others in Miami and Los Angeles, the future looks very bright for her. Confident in her abilities as both doctor and business women, and virtually assured of finally controlling her own destiny. Angela is on the verge of seeing her ambitions fulfilled. But then a surge of drug-resistant staph infections in all three hospitals devastates Angela’s carefully constructed world. Not only do the infections result in deaths of patients, but the fatalities cause a serious cash-flow problem, which puts her company’s imminent IPO in jeopardy. And that’s not all: Angela has serious doubts about her investors and the sources of their money, and the need for a sudden infusion of additional cash becomes all the more desperate. In the blink of an eye, after all her years of hard work, she may be left-empty handed. Vowing to keep her business afloat, Angela works around the clock to save what’s she built-knowing all too well that the only person she can count on is herself. New York City medical examiners Laurie Montgomery and Jack Stapleton are naturally intrigued by the uptick in staph-related post-procedure deaths at the three hospitals. Aside from their own professional curiosity, there’s a personal stake as well: they are newly married, and Jack is facing surgery to repair a torn ACL at Angels Orthopedic Hospital. Despite Jack’s protest, Laurie can’t help investigating-thus opening a Pandora’s box of corporate intrigue that threatens not just her livelihood, but her life and Jack’s as well.

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

• In 1993 a mountaineer named Greg Mortenson drifted into an impoverished Pakistan village in the Karakoram Mountains after a failed attempt to climb K2. Moved by the inhabitants’ kindness, he promised to return and build a school. Three cups of Tea is the story of that promise and its extraordinary outcome. Over the next decade Mortenson built not just one but fifty-five schools-especially for girls- in the forbidding terrain that gave birth to the Taliban. His story is at once a riveting adventure and a testament to the power of the humanitarian spirit.

Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality by Pauline W. Chen

• A brilliant young transplant surgeon brings moral intensity and narrative drama to the most powerful and vexing questions of medicine and the human condition. When Pauline Chen began medical school twenty years ago, she dreamed of saving lives. What she did not count on was how much death would be a part of her work. Almost immediately, Chen found herself wrestling with medicine’s most profound paradox, that a profession premised on caring for the ill also systematically depersonalizes dying. Final Exam follows Chen over the course of her education, training, and practice as she grapples at strikingly close range with the problem of mortality, and struggles to reconcile the lessons of her training with her innate knowledge of shared humanity, and to separate her ideas about healing from her fierce desire to cure. From her first dissection of a cadaver in gross anatomy to the moment she first puts a scalpel to a living person; from the first time she witnesses someone flatlining in the emergency room to the first time she pronounces a patient dead, Chen is struck by her own mortal fears: there was a dying friend she could not call; a young patient’s tortured death she could not forget; even the sense of shared kinship with a corpse she could not cast aside when asked to saw its pelvis in two. Gradually, as she confronts the ways in which her fears have incapacitated her, she begins to reject what she has been taught about suppressing her feelings for her patients, and she begins to carve out a new role for herself as a physician and as human being. Chen’s transfixing and beautiful rumination on how doctors negotiate the ineluctable fact of death becomes, in the end, a brilliant questioning of how we should live. Moving and provocative, motored equally by clinical expertise and extraordinary personal grace, this is a piercing and compassionate journey into the heart of a world that is hidden and yet touches all of our lives. A superb addition to the best medical literature of our time.

If you have any comments or recommendations you’d like to add, please email the PreHealth advisor.

Here are a few books your peers have recommended:

Intern by Sanddep Jauhar

The Scalpel and the Silver Bear by Lori Arviso Alvord

What Patient's Taught Me: A Medical Student's Journey by Audrey Young

On Becoming a Doctor by Tania Heller

On Call: A Doctor's Days and Nights in Residency by Emily R. Transue

Patient by Patient: Lessons in Love, Loss, Hope, and Healing from a Doctor's Practice by Emily R. Transue

Healing Hearts: A Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon by Kathy E. Magliato

Match Day: One Day and One Dramatic Year in the Lives of Three New Doctors by Brian Eule

How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman

Mountains Beyond Mountains: Healing the World: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer by Tracy Kidder

My Own Country My Own Country: A Doctor's Story by Abraham Verghese

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington

Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures by Carol Zimmer

Immortal Life of Henrietta Lack by Rebecca Skloot

Uncommon Wisdom: True Tales of What Our Lives as Doctors Have Taught us About Love, Faith, and Healing by John Castaldo

Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperect Science by Atul Gawande

Final Exam by Pauline Chen

The Anatomy of Hope by Jerome Groopman

Who Shall Live by Victor R. Fuchs

The Women Who Decided to Die by Ronald Munson

Every Patient Tells a Story by Lisa Sanders

Something for the Pain by Paul Astin