Medical Biography

At the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, dramatized by the popular film Black Hawk Down, the majority of soldiers who died were killed instantly or bled to death before they could reach an operating table. This tragedy reinforced the need for a revolutionary treatment that could transform trauma medicine. So, when Frank Hursey and Bart Gullong—who had no medical or military experience—discovered that a cheap, crushed rock called zeolite had blood‑clotting properties, they brought it to the military's attention. The Marines and the Navy adopted the resulting product, QuikClot, immediately.

From New York Times best-selling author and blogger Heather B. Armstrong comes an honest and irreverent memoir - reminiscent of the New York Times best-seller Brain on Fire - about her experience as one of only a few people to participate in an experimental treatment for depression involving 10 rounds of a chemically induced coma approximating brain death.

In ADHD and Me, he tells about the next 12 years as he learns to live with both the good and bad sides of life with ADHD. Blake's memoir offers, for the first time, a young person's account of what it's like to live and grow up with this common condition. Join Blake as he foils bullies, confronts unfair teachers, struggles with distraction and disorganization on exams, and goes sailing out-of-bounds and ends up with a boatload of spiders.

Dr. Steven Hatch first came to Liberia in November 2013 to work at a hospital in Monrovia. Six months later, several of the physicians Dr. Hatch had mentored and served with were dead or barely clinging to life, and Ebola had become a world health emergency. Hundreds of victims perished each week; whole families were destroyed in a matter of days; so many died so quickly that the culturally taboo practice of cremation had to be instituted to dispose of the bodies.

Writer and political activist Mike Marqusee was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer, in the summer of 2007. At first, disinclined to share his misery with others, he was reluctant to write about his illness. But he then came to realize that doing so provided a precious continuity with his life as a writer before contracting the disease, and a way of reaching out to a wider world that the illness made physically less accessible.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a country doctor in solo practice in the decade of the '70s - making house calls, delivering babies, comforting the dying, offering hope to the hopeless, meeting delightful and sometimes eccentric patients, and working 60 to 80 hours per week, often exhausted and in need of rest? If so, follow me as I work in a small town office and make hospital rounds in rural Indiana as a family physician. You're unlikely to forget the experiences or regret the sharing.

Skin cancer is this country's most common cancer, and melanoma the deadliest form of it. Richard Scolyer, together with his colleagues at Melanoma Institute Australia, has dedicated years to groundbreaking research and succeeded in transforming even the most advanced cases of melanoma into a largely curable disease. Then last year, at the peak of his life, Richard was devastated when he was diagnosed with an incurable brain cancer.

All In My Head is a memoir by a woman who in her early 50s received a life-shattering diagnosis. It is about her determined search for effective treatment, the birth of a campaign to get proper data and funding for research into glioblastoma (GBM), and finally her coming to terms with the knowledge that she has reached the end of the road.

In this partially autobiographical work, best-selling author Lewis Thomas offers insights on subjects as wide-ranging as gender differences, how it feels to be a patient, human vs. computer intelligence, the future of cancer research, and the longevity of the planet—interspersing all with charming anecdotes about his family, his colleagues and himself.

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo shares the inspiring story of how he came to be who he is. After experiencing abuse as a child, Dr. Ladapo was incapable of connecting emotionally with other people. He was dissociated from virtually everything in his life and numbly powered through college, medical school, and residency to become a doctor and university professor. It wasn’t until he fell in love with his wife that he was forced to come face-to-face with the enormous emotional and spiritual disruption caused by his deeply buried trauma.

As Jenny Lawson’s hundreds of thousands of fans know, she suffers from depression. In Broken, she explores her experimental treatment of transcranial magnetic stimulation with brutal honesty. But also with brutal humour. Jenny discusses the frustration of dealing with her insurance company in ‘An Open Letter to My Insurance Company’, which should be an anthem for anyone who has ever had to call their insurance company to try and get a claim covered.

One of the enduring lessons of the pandemic has been the pivotal role that nursing plays in health care—vital work that isn’t widely understood or, sadly, appreciated. Sara Fung and Amie Archibald-Varley started the wildly popular The Gritty Nurse podcast to give voice to nurses all over the world, including more than 400,000 nurses in Canada. The authors have quickly become sought-after speakers and advocates for nurses and are called on regularly by the media to talk about a wide range of issues around the profession.

In Life's Work, an outspoken Christian reproductive justice advocate and abortion provider (one of the few doctors to provide such services to women in Mississippi and Alabama) pulls from his personal and professional journeys as well as the scientific training he received as a doctor to reveal how he came to believe, unequivocally, that helping women in need, without judgment, is precisely the Christian thing to do.

Growing up as the daughter of a dedicated surgeon, Elizabeth L. Silver felt an unquestioned faith in medicine. When her six-week-old daughter, Abby, was rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit with sudden seizures, and scans revealed a serious brain bleed, her relationship to medicine began to change. The Tincture of Time is Silver's gorgeous and haunting chronicle of Abby's first year. It's a year of unending tests, doctors' opinions, sleepless nights, and, above all, uncertainty.

The Aging Revolution is the story of Butler and his disciples: women and men who saw older distressed adults in hospitals and homes, and worse: being ignored by most of the medical establishment. These revolutionaries could not ignore the suffering, and they set out—individually and collectively—to create entirely new ways of caring for aging adults to ease their suffering and improve their quality and length of life.

Following up her international best seller The Zookeeper's Wife, Diane Ackerman tells the breathtaking story of the stroke that deprived her husband, Paul West - a distinguished novelist and poet - of every scrap of language beyond the syllable "mem". In her characteristically glorious prose, Ackerman weaves together the latest science on stroke and the brain’s ability to store and process language, with her intensely personal journey as caregiver in helping Paul to an extraordinary recovery.

Comedy meets drama in this cosy, heart-warming tale of a man, his dogs, and his dreams. Join Mark as he struggles with zany patients, gets fleeced by his ex-wife, and makes a friend called “Shovelhead”. Sometimes Mark’s ahead, mostly the world tramples him into the dirt, but so long as he has his dogs to go home to, his caravan (which IS home), and now Diane - Mark’s optimism never falters. Well, hardly ever... “Eyes Up” is the story of a home-visiting optician, written by—a home-visiting optician! WHAT READERS HAVE SAID: ‘The Optometrist equivalent of James Herriot?’ ‘...

Cowboys and Indian: A Doctor’s First Year in Texas is an exciting and entertaining account of a doctor’s first year of practice in an underserved Texas hospital. Besides the challenges of being an immigrant and a husband and father, the doctor manages medical emergencies like cardiac arrests, collapsed lungs, industrial accidents, lacerations, and other traumas—all with minimal resources. In the course of that fateful first year, the heart-warming and often hilarious events show medical science at its best.

More of: You can't make this stuff up. A collection of true, short stories from the experiences that made me who I am. Some are funny, some serious, some sad, some empowering. Starting with some stories from my youth, then a bunch of stories of mostly medical related happenings.

At first glance, Anthony Chin-Quee looks like a traditional success story: a smart, ambitious kid who grew up to become a board-certified otolaryngologist—an ear, nose, and throat surgeon. Yet the truth is more complicated. As a self-described “not white, mostly Black, and questionably Asian man,” Chin-Quee knows that he doesn’t fit easily into any category. Growing up in a family with a background of depression, he struggled with relationships, feelings of inadequacy, and a fear of failure that made it difficult for him to forge lasting bonds with others.