The most recommended medicine books

Originally published in 1987 this book is a classic text for those studying health and disease in this era. Drawing on diaries and printed materials it explains what people died of in the era and what conditions they lived with. It describes how people responded to ill health both spiritually and medically and it provides a series of case studies to illuminate different aspects of health, including women’s health. Using practitioners’ casebooks, it thinks about the differences between an urban surgeon and the practice of rural physicians. It thus moves beyond generalizations to show that practitioners worked alongside each other to heal patients drawn from different socio-economic backgrounds and that the practice of medicine was supplemented and relied upon interventions by friends, family, and community.

Nora Beady is a great heroine. Even though she is living in the “shadow” of a doctor – women weren’t allowed to practice medicine in 1845 in England – she’s not cynical about it.

She just does the job Dr. Croft asks her to, and she cares a great deal about improving the health of others. Along the way, she falls in love, and her love interest is refreshingly supportive. I don’t usually care for stories where the characters are cynical and everyone is mean. Which is probably why I write romance!

I turned the pages in this book so quickly, because I couldn’t wait for when the medical world found out Nora was an amazing doctor!

This classic 1966 movie and the novelization by SF icon Isaac Asimov really hooked me on science fiction. So much so that I later felt compelled to write an hommage to it. Travelling through the human bloodstream? Being attacked by antibodies and white blood cells? Irresistible! One of the things SF does best is to show us familiar things from an entirely new perspective, and Fantastic Voyage did that in spades with a premise that was outlandish but completely serious and groundbreaking. Although Asimov wrote the novel version from the screenplay, it was released before the movie and it’s difficult to separate the two. I really recommend enjoying both.

Asimov later wrote a novel of his own (not a sequel) called Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain published in 1987, but it isn’t all that memorable.

The fact that I’ve read this book to my son nearly every night for the past year and am not sick of it yet is a testament to how charming it is. This book is about a group of friends and one of them, Giraffe, is very grumpy. The friends take turns in trying, then failing, to cheer him up, until finally they all become sad and it’s up to Giraffe to cheer up his friends. The story is a great reminder that our emotions are not just ours. They’re contagious and affect those we love most. Also, if I had to pick a book to represent my son, who usually has a grumpy look on his face, this would be the one! 

Ms. Swift’s lyrical writing immediately enthralled me in this unusual story. Alice, stuck in an arranged marriage in 1660 England, uses her skills to protect an orchid called the Lady’s Slipper. But her nemesis, Richard, also her landlord, wants it for other reasons. Their animosity changes to attraction, and I loved the emotions between them. Ms. Swift writes with skill about the Quakers, the era, and a forbidden love. She easily weaves history with heartbreak, and I devoured this story, never wanting it to end. The drama never drags, and I could not put it down. Later, I met Ms. Swift at a writers’ conference, and she’s a sweet, humble woman. One of my all-time favorite novels.

The development of anesthesia was met with confusion, dismissal, and even derision. While today we are accustomed to the idea of the patient being asleep, at the time it was seen as similar to operating on a dead body. Without the indications of pain or relief, how was the surgeon to feel what he was doing? And in its earliest days, some forms of anesthesia could be dangerous, the patient dying if the dosage wasn’t correct or they had an adverse reaction. But for the patient, and for surgeons who needed more time for an operation, anesthesia was an unequivocal blessing that took away pain and made life-saving procedures possible.

Few people – perhaps even those of us in the eating disorders field – really appreciate just how common eating disorders and disordered eating are.

In this book, an eating disorder physician calls into question the cognitive distortion that someone isn’t “sick enough” to warrant intervention and eating disorder recovery.

I love how Dr. Gaudiani not only covers the reddest flags of eating disorders, but acknowledges what many of us have come to regard as “normal” but in reality is disordered, dangerous, and harmful.

Eric Sloane’s books are a celebration of early American life and have a historical bent that nicely complements the artwork. Here, too, it was hard to pick which of his books rose to the top for us.  Reverence for Wood speaks to values that are enduring through the ages and will resonate with other traditional builders as they do with us. Sloane’s writing, and his illustrations, are beautiful.

This book is a typical first-person account of a student in a program (medical, in this case) who encounters some discrepancies between the idealistically-drawn portrait of how a medical school is supposed to operate and the actual realities in which jealousies, territoriality, and the ongoing scramble to acquire and defend power within the institution play a major role. The main character is naïve to such considerations until they are made apparent to him. 

Deming’s work is classic. He understood how messed up the corporate world was getting way back in the 1960s. But we Americans wouldn’t listen, so he went and helped Japan, and most notably, Toyota. It’s fascinating to read his work that was way ahead of its time and notice the things we are just starting to implement today. It’s also a great prophecy of what’s to come.