Books
The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read - Abraham Lincoln
image by: Kate Ter Haar
HWN Suggests
The Passing of a Legend: Michael Crichton
Michael Crichton, one of the most prolific medical writers didn’t win a Pulitzer or a national book award for his writings, however, his books sold as many as 150 million copies around the globe. His movie and TV credits were equally as impressive including Jurassic Park and the successful television series ER.
The New York Times said, “Reviewers often complained that Mr. Crichton’s characters were wooden, that his ear for dialogue was tin and that his science was suspect. Environmentalists raged against his skeptical views on climate change, first expressed in the 2004 novel, “State of Fear,” and subsequently in various public forums. Even…
Resources
Animal Factory
In Animal Factory, bestselling investigative journalist David Kirby exposes the powerful business and political interests behind large-scale factory farms, and tracks the far-reaching fallout that can contaminate our air, land, and water supply.
Surviving American Medicine
We live in a time when the business of health care has superseded the care of health. Health-care reform isn’t just political rhetoric: it’s a reality. It’s happening every day–and for you it means new ways of getting your care. Virtually every American understands we are experiencing dramatic changes in the delivery of health care and the insurance programs that pay for it. In Surviving American Medicine, Dr. Cary Presant lays the foundation to help you take control of these issues and help you become your own advocate.
A Doctor Argues That Her Profession Needs to Slow Down, Stat
Doctors today often complain of working in an occupational black hole in which patient encounters are compressed into smaller and smaller space and time. You can do a passable job in a 10-minute visit, they say, but it is impossible to appreciate the subtleties of patient care when you are rushing. Enter “Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing,” a wonderful new memoir by Dr. Victoria Sweet.
'One Doctor' by Brendan Reilly
"One Doctor" rambles over the entire landscape of American medicine—from the perversities of health-care economics to who, exactly, empties the bedpans—and even the book's shortcomings have merit. Dr. Reilly's many, many anecdotes about patients, although vividly written, come almost too quickly sometimes, with a new character appearing practically every page. But this barrage of detail serves an artistic purpose: It captures the chaos that Dr. Reilly faces every day on his rounds.
Book as Mobile Device: No Really, a Medieval Almanac That Attached to Your Belt
Transporting large quantities information has always been a challenge, including when that information was astrological tables and your medium was vellum.
Digital Disruption Meets Healthcare: A Review Of 'The Digital Doctor'
At the heart of Dr. Robert Wachter’s book, “The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age,” is a healthcare horror story, a cautionary tale warning against the presumption that digitizing a process necessarily makes it better.
Doctors Tell All—and It’s Bad
A crop of books by disillusioned physicians reveals a corrosive doctor-patient relationship at the heart of our health-care crisis.
Health Care Reform: A History In Books
The New York Review of Books, we can watch its trajectory and, perhaps, learn from what’s come before. From the 1970s when costs skyrocketed forcing people to take on the cost of health insurance to the Clinton era, when not only did Americans have to deal with higher premiums, but new limitations on choice and a healthcare system that had one set of rules for those of greater means, and another set for those of lesser, see for yourself and why what’s happening now is so crucial.
Medical Blockbuster Book Of The Year: The Patient Will See You Now
I can't think of a book that does a better job of projecting how the future of medicine will unfold and the critical role individuals will play in their own health (beyond the obvious).
New Book Details Healthcare's 'Slow-Moving Heist'
An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back, a well-researched broadside against the American healthcare system by Elisabeth Rosenthal, a former New York Times reporter and current editor of Kaiser Health News.
Nutrition Advice From the China Study
Six years ago a small Texas publisher released an obscure book written by a father-son research team. The work, based on a series of studies conducted in rural China and Taiwan, challenged the conventional wisdom about health and nutrition by espousing the benefits of a plant-based diet.
Preventive Medicine
In 1796, an English country doctor named Edward Jenner successfully immunized a child against smallpox, the world’s deadliest infectious disease. His experiment, “An Inquiry Into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae” (or “smallpox of the cow”) added the word “vaccination” to our vocabulary. News of Jenner’s stunning achievement led millions throughout Europe to roll up their sleeves. Napoleon, Britain’s mortal enemy, had his troops vaccinated before taking the field. “Ah, Jenner,” he supposedly said after freeing two English prisoners at the doctor’s request, “I can withhold nothing from that man.” Yet, as Arthur Allen makes clear in “Vaccine,” a timely, fair-minded and crisply written account of “medicine’s greatest lifesaver,” not everyone welcomed Jenner’s feat. Criticism came quickly, often in apocalyptic terms.
Putting Down the Scalpel, Picking Up the Pen
Bartolo’s book (which he wrote with the help of Tilotta) tells the relevant and poignant story of his life as a physician on Lampedusa, an Italian island in the Mediterranean that is often the first port of call for refugees crossing to Europe from Libya.
The American Health Care Paradox: A Book Review
The American Health Care Paradox: by Elizabeth H. Bradley and Lauren A. Taylor. How medical and social services became separate, unequal and ineffective.
The problem with diet books written by doctors
Diet books are a multimillion-dollar industry, and it's no surprise, since millions of people struggle with their weight and long for answers about what they can do to slim down. Books can provide valuable tips on healthful patterns of eating. Some are more outlandish than others. But the problem with all of them is what they promise when it comes to weight loss. No doctor has ever uncovered the solution to weight loss. If someone had found the fix for this immensely vexing and complex problem, we wouldn't be facing an obesity crisis.
‘Extreme Medicine: How Exploration Transformed Medicine’ by Kevin Fong
Each chapter of Fong’s book, “Extreme Medicine,” focuses on a different challenge to human survival. “Ice,” “Fire,” “Water” and “Orbit” explore medicine’s and technology’s efforts to keep people alive during or after exposure to extreme environments.
The Passing of a Legend: Michael Crichton
Michael Crichton didn’t win a Pulitzer or a national book award for his writings, however, his books sold as many as 150 million copies around the globe. There is no doubt that Crichton contributed to a healthier world in more ways than one!
The 23 best health and science books to read this summer
Read on for recommendations from CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna and CDC Director Robert Redfield. Plus, STAT readers from Boston to Ireland to Australia share their picks, in addition to our staff. Enjoy!
The Best Books of 2017 About Healthy Aging
Great reads for keeping the mind, body and spirit engaged. And maybe making a little money as well.
Three Books That Track Diseases, Drugs and the World They Made
Each time the specter of bird flu arises, so too do grim references to the global pandemic that killed tens of millions of people in 1918.
Contagion
After he loses first his midwestern ophthalmology practice to a for-profit medical giant and then his family to a commuter airline tragedy, Dr. John Stapleton's life is transformed to ashes. Feeling less the golden boy than a jaded cynic, Stapleton retrains in forensic pathology and relocates to find an uneasy niche for himself...
Courage To Heal
Set in a world of iron lungs and the Great Depression, when women and babies are dying in poorly run charity hospitals, Courage to Heal is based on the true story of a young surgeon, Sidney Garfield, who along with the twentieth century's boldest industrialist, Henry Kaiser, changes the face of American medicine. Garfield is brought to life in this story of an intransigent physician, his fight to provide health care to all.
Fast Food Nation
Given my distaste for fast food and the general knowledge of its detrimental effect on the American diet, I didn’t expect to find any revelations in Fast Food Nation. But journalist Eric Schlosser’s thoroughly researched and well-written probe into the industry that has transformed American roadsides, eating patterns, and agriculture was actually an eye-opener.
Flesh and Blood
Organ transplantation is one of the most dramatic interventions in modern medicine. Since the 1950s thousands of people have lived with 'new' hearts, kidneys, lungs, corneas, and other organs and tissues transplanted into their bodies. From the beginning, though, there was simply a problem: surgeons often encountered shortages of people willing and able to give their organs and tissues.
Living ‘With the End in Mind’
Palliative care is an alternative to the relentless and costly treatment that is so common toward the end of life. Laura Landro reviews ‘With the End in Mind’ by Kathryn Mannix.
Medical Miracles
Modern culture tends to separate medicine and miracles, but their histories are closely intertwined. The Roman Catholic Church recognizes saints through canonization based on evidence that they worked miracles, as signs of their proximity to God. Jacalyn Duffin has examined Vatican sources on 1400 miracles from six continents and spanning four centuries.
Mending Bodies, Saving Souls
By chronicling the transformations of hospitals from houses of mercy to tools of confinement, from dwellings of rehabilitation to spaces for clinical teaching and research, from rooms for birthing and dying to institutions of science and technology, this book provides a historical approach to understanding of today's hospitals.
Miracle Cure
Miracle Cure was inspired by several highly publicized cases of cheating in academic research, one of them in the lab of a Nobel Prize winner here in Boston.
Natural Causes
Natural Causes was a breakthrough book for me in that it was the first of my novels to make it into the top five of The New York Times Best-Seller List.
Nature Cures
This is the first comprehensive history of alternative medicine in America, examining the major systems that have emerged from 1800 to the present. Writing with wit and with fairness to all sides, Whorton offers a fascinating look at alternative health systems.
Polio: An American Story
All who lived in the early 1950s remember the fear of polio and the elation felt when a successful vaccine was found. Now David Oshinsky tells the gripping 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.
Suicide in the Middle Ages
"Suicide" and "the Middle Ages" sounds like a contradiction. Was life not too short anyway, and the Church too disapproving, to admit suicide? And how is the historian supposed to find out?
The Big Thirst
"The Big Thirst" offers a cataract of statistics. The average American flushes the toilet five times a day, the author says, using 18.5 gallons of water. That comes to "5.7 billion gallons of clean drinking water down the toilet." An Australian rice farmer with 10,450 acres uses six gigaliters of water—that's six billion liters, or enough to hand almost everyone on the planet a bottle of Evian.
The Blue Zones
One of the first things Buettner was quick to establish was that your longevity is mostly up to you. Yes, genes play a part, but only a small part compared to what most people give them credit for. How healthy you are into your old age is 80% your lifestyle choices and only 20% your genetics. And it would make sense that if you want to live the longest, you would take advice from the people who have lived the longest and simply do as they did.
The Disagreement: A Novel
In 1862, at age 17, John Muro is packed off from Lynchburg to the University of Virginia Medical School, a berth that exempts him from the Confederate draft. Thanks to a flood of casualties, he's soon promoted to full-fledged doctor at the local military hospital, where his sense of detachment helps him deal with the carnage of war''and spills over into the rest of his life.
The First Miracle Drugs
In the decade from 1935-1945, while the Second World War raged in Europe, a new class of medicines capable of controlling bacterial infections launched a therapeutic revolution that continues today. The new medicines were not penicillin and antibiotics, but sulfonamides, or sulfa drugs. The sulfa drugs preceded penicillin by almost a decade...
The First Patient
Gabe Singleton and Andrew Stoddard were once roommates. Today, Gabe is a doctor and his friend Andrew has gone from war hero to governor to President of the United States. One day, while the United States is embroiled in a bitter presidential election campaign, Marine One lands on Gabe's Wyoming ranch, and President Stoddard announces that his personal physician has suddenly and mysteriously disappeared -- and he desperately needs Gabe to take the man's place.
The Omnivore's Dilemma
What should we have for dinner? The question has confronted us since man discovered fire, but according to Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of The Botany of Desire, how we answer it today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may well determine our very survival as a species. Should we eat a fast-food hamburger? Something organic?
The Second Opinion
Two novelists excel in writing medical mysteries. Both are physicians who write best sellers. One is Robin Cook and the second is Michael Palmer. Both write thrillers that involve medical conspiracies, generally headed by hospital personnel who are more interested in money than in their patients’ health. Even people who are unable to watch medical shows or hear about medical procedures or visit hospitals or see blood flow are able to read and enjoy the twists and turns in their books.
The Terminal Man
Certainly The Terminal Man is eminently readable – I tore through it in a couple of days during my holiday – but it's also curiously colourless. The central idea is compelling: Harold Benson, a computer engineer suffering from blackouts and concurrent violent episodes following an accident, elects to undergo experimental surgery to have an electronic mood stabilizer hooked up to his brain – a kind of pacemaker for the mind.
This Side of Doctoring
Here, in This Side of Doctoring Eliza Lo Chin offers a penetrating analysis of what it's like to be a woman in the highly competitive field of medicine. Written over the last century and a half, this collection of personal stories, poems, essays, and quotations reveals the intimate lives of over a hundred female physicians.
Toxin
Just how safe is America's meat supply? Recent health scares and new public awareness have made this one of today's most controversial subjects - and the basis of Robin Cook's most startling, and important novel. When a doctor's daughter becomes infected with E. coli, the widespread dangers of bacterial contamination are no longer a subject for debate, but a grim reality.
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