Medical Historical Fiction

Laos, 1972. The Communist Pathet Lao has taken over. Most of the educated class has fled, but 72-year-old Dr Siri Paiboun, a Paris-trained doctor, remains and is appointed state coroner. When three bodies are recovered from a reservoir, Dr.Siri establishes the cause of death was not drowning - they seem to have been electrocuted. And then there is the inexplicable death of a Party bigwig's wife at a banquet. Dr.Siri doesn't think her death was from natural causes.

In the shadows of New York City lies forbidden North Brother Island, where the remains of a shuttered sanatorium hide the haunting memories of century-old quarantines and human experiments. The ruins conceal the scarred and beautiful Cora, imprisoned by contagions and the doctors who torment her.

Gabriella Mondini is a rarity in 16th-century Venice: a woman who practices medicine. Her father, a renowned physician, has provided her entrée to this all-male profession, and inspired in her a shared mission to understand the secrets of the human body. Then her father disappears, and Gabriella faces a crisis: She is no longer permitted to treat her patients, women who need her desperately, without her father's patronage. She sets out across Europe to find where - and why - he has gone.

"Dog days and the fresh bodies are arriving once again." So begins the fall term at South Carolina Medical College, where Dr. Jacob Thacker is on probation for Xanax abuse. His interim career - working public relations for the dean - takes an unnerving detour into the past when the bones of African American slaves, over a century old, are unearthed on the campus. Out of the college’s dark past, these bones threaten to rise and condemn the present.

A short story companion to Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, and Frankenstein 2035 by Kev Freeman. The journal written by Victor Frankenstein recording his final experiments leading to the recipe and creation of life. Experimentation and Findings of the Indulgence of Animal Electricity within the Stature of Man. I begin this journal with the anticipation that these records of my endeavors will sometime provide others with a foundation for further experimentation into the remarkability of the human spirit. Victor Frankenstein, September, 1792. Victor Frankenstein studied...

As the Great Depression presses down around him, Archer teeters at the edge of a precipice. He must choose between his hard-won career and the sacred oaths he took as a doctor and scientist—before all his choices are lost forever.

The discovery of a deadly virus being smuggled across the border pits FBI Special Agent James Mason and his strike force against an unknown adversary hell-bent on humanity’s destruction. In a desperate effort to contain the pathogen, they launch a predawn raid, only to find that their enemy knows they’re coming...and it’s not about to be taken alive. An explosion rips through the building, killing the majority of Mason’s team, including his partner and mentor.

En vísperas del siglo XX, Mary Mallon emigró de Irlanda a los quince años para abrirse paso en Nueva York. Valiente, obstinada y soñando con ser cocinera, luchó por ascender desde el escalón más bajo de la escala de servicio doméstico. Astuta y emprendedora, se metió en la cocina y descubrió que poseía el talento de un verdadero chef. Buscada por la aristocracia de Nueva York, y con una independencia poco frecuente para una mujer de la época, parecía haber logrado la vida que pretendía cuando llegó a Castle Garden.

In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new flu are quarantined together. Into Julia’s regimented world step two outsiders - Doctor Kathleen Lynn, on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney. In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other’s lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world.

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award with In the Time of Butterflies, author Julia Alvarez is a beloved voice in modern fiction and poetry. In Saving the World, she weaves the stories of two courageous women—separated by two centuries—into a breathtaking novel of love and idealism in an increasingly troubled world.

On the banks of the River Seine in 1899, a young woman takes her final breath before plunging into the icy water. Although she does not know it, her decision will set in motion an astonishing chain of events. It will lead to 1950s Norway, where a grieving toy-maker is on the cusp of a transformative invention, all the way to present-day Canada where a journalist, battling a terrible disease, risks everything for one last chance to live.

A newly minted graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in 1890, Dr. Thomas Parks heads to the big timber country of Puget Sound to practice trauma medicine. An hour after stepping off the boat, he's nearly crushed to death by a less-than-sure-footed mule and finds himself a patient rather than a physician. As he convalesces, he discovers that his host, a venerable physician friend of his father's, is running an elaborate medical scam, selling worthless concoctions nationwide, with enormous sales.

The powerful story of an unlikely friendship and a doctor’s re-education on the battlefields of the Vietnam War. Fresh out of medical school and planning to enter academia, David pragmatically applies to serve in the US Army, thinking he would rather work in a stateside military hospital than get drafted. But when he gets reassigned to Southeast Asia, he suddenly finds himself on a base in Vietnam. He joins a civilian aid mission on a supposedly secure plateau, and spends his days dispensing pills to villagers.

1910: people are mysteriously dying at an alarming rate in the Russian-ruled city of Kharbin, a major railway outpost in Northern China. Strangely, some of the dead bodies vanish before they can be identified. During a dangerously cold winter in a city gripped by fear, the Baron, a wealthy Russian aristocrat and the city's medical commissioner, is determined to stop this mysterious plague. Battling local customs, an occupying army, and a brutal epidemic with no name, the Baron is torn between Western medical science and respect for Chinese tradition.

Julia Hamill has made a horrifying discovery on the grounds of her new home in rural Massachusetts: a skull buried in the rocky soil � human, female, and, according to the trained eye of Boston medical examiner Maura Isles, scarred with the unmistakable marks of murder.

Sicily, 1943. Eddie Harkins, former Philadelphia beat cop turned Military Police lieutenant, reluctantly finds himself first at the scene of a murder at the US Army's 11th Field Hospital. There the nurses contend with heat, dirt, short-handed staffs, the threat of German counterattack, an ever-present flood of horribly wounded GIs, and the threat of assault by one of their own - at least until someone shoots Dr. Myers Stephenson in the head.

February 29, 1916. A baby girl is born—but as the months and years go by, Kit McKinley inexplicably ages just one year for every four. Her mother Lillian, a fledgling botanist, fears that Kit’s condition will catch the attention of Lillian’s fellow suffragettes, who have embraced the eugenics craze sweeping North America targeting unfit, unwed mothers and “defective” children. For decades, Kit and her family must keep on the move to conceal her secret and protect her from the unwanted attention.

From the best-selling author of The Piano Tuner comes Daniel Mason's The Winter Soldier, a story of love and medicine through the devastation of the First World War. Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a 22-year-old medical student when World War One explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, expecting a position at a well-organized field hospital. But when he arrives at a commandeered church tucked away high in a remote valley of the Carpathian Mountains, he finds a freezing outpost ravaged by typhus.

Deciding on her 39th birthday that a baby is the best present she could give herself, single Manhattan public relations executive Nina Kitchener makes an appointment to undergo artificial insemination at the Human Fertility Institute. Nine months later the nightmare begins. Just hours after she gives birth, someone kidnaps her infant son from the nursery. The police aren't helping, the fertility institute has shut down, and Nina believes that the only way to find her baby is to learn the identity of the sperm donor.

Young theatre nurse Clare Maitland is devastated when her fiancé calls off their dream wedding because he wants to marry someone else. Her friendship with charming surgeon Andrew Darvie provides comfort, but is it enough to mend a broken heart? Meanwhile, Clare's feelings are hurt by the harsh comments of moody but talented Dr. Hugh Sanders. The chance of a nursing job in Scotland seems the answer to all of Clare's problems. But she soon discovers that escaping the men in her life won't be as easy as she imagined.