Medical Biography

At 27, Melissa Keaster’s life with her loving husband and two-year-old son seems divinely blessed. But after their daughter is born, several episodes of anaphylaxis leave her wondering if she will even live to raise her kids. Melissa begins to have severe allergic reactions to everything—food, fragrances, even the cold. The doctors are mystified as to the cause of her illness, and she becomes a shut-in to protect herself. As the disease steals one blessing after another, Melissa faces a choice: shake a fist at the heavens, or open her hands to everything God has for her.

In July 1952, Dr. Walter Freeman arrived at the gates of a West Virginia asylum. In his medical bag he carried two metal picks and a surgical hammer. He had invented a “cheap, easy” ten-minute lobotomy. The press described it as a miracle cure, a new frontier in psychosurgery. That summer, in just twelve days, Freeman lobotomized 228 men, women, and children in West Virginia’s public mental hospitals. His blitzkrieg of brain surgery became known as “Operation Ice Pick,” named after the tools he wielded.

You can't always count on people, but you can always count on your dog. No one knows that better than veterinarian Jessica Vogelsang, who, with the help of three dogs, is buoyed through adolescence, veterinary school, and the early years of motherhood. Taffy, the fearsome Lhasa; Emmett, an amiable golden; and Kekoa, the neurotic senior Labrador are always by her side, offering lessons in empathy and understanding for all the oddballs and misfits who come through the vet clinic doors.

A los mandos de un microscopio ultrapotente y un catéter de alta precisión, el doctor Marsh se abre camino por los intersticios del cerebro. Con frecuencia, de su pericia y de su pulso dependen que un paciente recupere la visión o acabe en una silla de ruedas. Hay días en los que salva vidas, pero también hay jornadas nefastas en las que un pequeño error o una cadena de infortunios lo hacen sentirse el ser más desdichado sobre la faz de la Tierra.

Dean Braxton was hospitalized due to kidney stones. The procedure to break down the stones caused an infection which eventually made his heart stop. When Dean died, he was taken to heaven, where he met Jesus, family members, and saw God, the father of creation! He should have been a vegetable or dead, when in fact Dean Braxton's heart had been stopped for 1 hour and 45 minutes. After he came back from heaven, he was instantly healed of 29 medical conditions, and today he is called the Miracle Man, and has written a book of his complete account of heaven in the afterlife.

Jeanne Marie Laskas first met the young forensic pathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu in 2009, while reporting a story for GQ that would go on to inspire the movie Concussion. Omalu told her about a day in September 2002, when, in a dingy morgue in downtown Pittsburgh, he picked up a scalpel and made a discovery that would rattle America in ways he’d never intended. Omalu was new to America, chasing the dream, a deeply spiritual man escaping the wounds of civil war in Nigeria.

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.

When Henry Scowcroft's partner, Zarah, was diagnosed with stage-four bladder cancer in 2016, their world fell apart. An award-winning science writer for Cancer Research UK, Henry had spent 14 years at the coal-face of cancer research, but now the disease had infiltrated his personal life too. Henry uses this unique perspective to tell the story of Zarah's illness, how he tried in vain to use everything he'd learnt in his professional career to try to save her and in doing so, how he realised that even a career writing about cancer daily isn't enough preparation for what comes next.

Welcome to Bryson City, a small town tucked away in a fold of North Carolina's Smoky Mountains. The scenery is breathtaking, the home cooking can't be beat, the Maroon Devils football team is the pride of the town, and you won't find better steelhead fishing anywhere. But the best part is the people you're about to meet in Bryson City Seasons. In this joyous sequel to his bestselling Bryson City Tales, Dr. Walt Larimore whisks you along on a journey through the seasons of a Bryson City year.

Burning the Days captures a singular life, beginning with a Manhattan boyhood and then, satisfying his father's wishes, graduation from West Point, followed by service in the Air Force as a pilot. In some of the most evocative pages ever written about flying, Salter describes the exhilaration and terror of combat as a fighter pilot in the Korean War, scenes that are balanced by haunting pages of love and a young man's passion for women.

As a young man, Albert Schweitzer seemed destined for greatness. His immense talent and fortitude propelled him to a place as one of Europe's most renowned philosophers, theologians, and musicians in the early 20th century. Yet Schweitzer shocked his contemporaries by forsaking worldly success and embarking on an epic journey into the wilds of French Equatorial Africa, vowing to serve as a lifelong physician to "the least of these" in a mysterious land rife with famine, sickness, and superstition.

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.

In this revelatory memoir, doctor Cynthia Li shares the truth other doctors don’t always understand and often won’t share if they do - that chronic illness is complicated, and that treatment is not just a matter of test results and prescriptions but requires a more comprehensive approach. By sharing her own struggle with a disabling autoimmune crisis, which forced her to question her own conventional medical training and embrace the integrative principles of functional medicine, Li reveals the insider knowledge sufferers need to truly begin healing - mind, body, and spirit.

Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man ended on a harrowing note. Suffering from severe depression after her 18 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.

Welcome to the life of a junior doctor: 97-hour weeks, life-and-death decisions, a constant tsunami of bodily fluids and the hospital parking meter earns more than you. Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights and missed weekends, Adam Kay's This Is Going to Hurt provides a no-holds-barred account of his time on the NHS front line. Hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking, this diary is everything you wanted to know - and more than a few things you didn't - about life on and off the hospital ward.

Are you a sucker for all things animal? You won't want to miss this heartwarming biography of James Herriot - one of the most famous and deeply-loved vets the world has ever known. Herriot is remembered as the modest Scotsman who wrote books that became worldwide best sellers, films, audiobooks, and a much-loved television show. But no one has ever seen him as distinguished writer Graham Lord portrays him here.

Lewy Body Blues: A Family’s Roller Coaster Experience with Lewy Body Dementia is an insider’s perspective on how one family adapted and learned to cope with this incredibly challenging and progressively debilitating disease. Based on a personal journey and filled with facts and strategies for handling Lewy Body Dementia, this book is essential listening for anyone desiring to learn more about this little-known brain disorder.

More than four hundred abandoned suitcases filled with patients’ belongings were found when Willard Psychiatric Center closed in 1995 after 125 years of operation. They are skillfully examined here and compared to the written record to create a moving—and devastating—group portrait of twentieth-century American psychiatric care.

William Osler was one of the big four founding fathers of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and later became the Regis Professor of Medicine at Oxford. But this acclaimed physician was so much more. This is a remarkable story.

September 25, 2012. Ted Neill picked up a knife to cut his wrists open and kill himself. Post hospitalization and treatment for major depressive disorder, he wrote Two Years of Wonder, a memoir based on his journey toward recovery. In it, he examines the experience that left him with such despair: living and working for two years at an orphanage for children with HIV/AIDS in Nairobi, Kenya.