Fans pick 100 books like Modern Death

Being Mortal exposes the often-inhumane ways “modern healthcare” cares for older people who are ill. Too often, we send older people to soulless institutionalized living facilities, overtreat them with medications and procedures, and undertreat them with kindness and dignity.

We can do much better in caring for chronically ill elderly people, and Gawande makes a strong case for doing so in this beautifully written book. I assign this book for my healthcare seminar, and it often emboldens students to intervene in the healthcare and living experiences of elderly family members. It happens every semester. I love it!

I could not resist this book partly because I was already familiar with Doughty’s, “Ask a Mortician” YouTube series. I loved the way that she used her own experience as a young crematory operator, weaving in details of her personal life along the way, to show us all the different things that happen to bodies after they die.

I loved the dark humor she brought to subjects like embalming, cremation, and funeral directing. The poignant stories about collecting bodies from the places where they died, cremating bodies, and talking to family members or loved ones, helped me see the deeply human side of death care, and I certainly came away understanding a lot more about the realities of different body preparation and disposition options!

I read this book for the first time about five years ago, and my first thought when I finished it was, “Everyone who is going to die needs this book.” This is the best thing I’ve read on the personal choices around dying and supporting someone who is dying.

I love the clear, level-headed, plain-spoken, simple, and elegant text and the way that Tisdale uses personal storytelling and philosophical reflection to help us address what we might otherwise avoid. I will return to this book over and over as I support sick or dying friends, and you can bet it will be on my bedside table if I am ever diagnosed with a terminal illness.

This book is deceptively short for something as deep and thoughtful. I loved this because of its focus on nonjudgmental, openhearted caregiving.

I wish I’d had this book when my mother was dying and I was acting both as her emotional supporter and her medical advocate. I frequently erred on the side of being her advocate and neglected my role as emotional supporter. This tiny little incredibly powerful book would have helped me tremendously! I will revisit it often.

This is a brilliant, thoughtful analysis of how sudden death is managed and can be read as a response to Sudnow — and I do assign it for that reason. But what I really love is leaving it out in my office and seeing people’s reactions. “The myth of CPR? What?!” People are horrified. Timmermans clearly shows, and it has been well documented, that CPR works way better on television than it does in real life. But its use has become so standardized that EMTs, as well as family members, were horrified when CPR wasn’t attempted on every dead body picked up during the pandemic.

If your beloved 93-year-old great grandma was just finishing the last bites of her favorite food that you spent all day making when she slumped over – should you hold her tight, whisper that you love her, or quickly put her on her back, break… show more.

This biography of the second century CE celebrity doctor Galen is one of the most surprising and revealing books I’ve ever read about Rome. A native of Asia Minor who got his start treating gladiators, Galen came to Rome and vied for prominence with the city’s intellectuals. By his own account, he wowed Romans with his skill in diagnosis and public vivisections of animals as gruesome as anything you’d see in the arena. Something like one-eighth of all surviving classical Greek literature is made up of Galen’s writings. Susan Mattern excavates this vast body of material to recover Galen’s own astonishing career, his interactions with his patients (including the emperor Marcus Aurelius), and his observations of terrible scenes of Roman life such as a dangerous copper mine, famine in the countryside, and a major fire in 192 that burned down much of the imperial capital.

This is an honest, vulnerable book in which the author, an experienced physician at the top of his game, questions his own approach to patients. 

Are we doctors as “scientific” as we think we are, or are we just dependent on rigid protocols and implicit, incorrect beliefs that cause harm? The book provides a road map for doctors and lay readers alike to rethink the doctor-patient relationship and all the decision-making that comes from it.

After I decided to include this old favourite of mine, I discovered to my great delight that Bodies Politic is about to be reissued in paperback. Roy Porter was the most prolific, fluent and insightful academic I have ever been privileged to know, and decades ago, his lectures inspired me to recognise how much fun historical research can be. In my own work, I have focused strongly on images – not only in textbooks, but also in journals, art galleries and albums. As Porter expertly discusses, studying caricatures is immensely enjoyable but also invaluable for uncovering concealed controversies, which provide crucial indicators of what people really thought.

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.

It was a great idea to make Harvey come to life by imagining what he’d have written in his diary! This is a well-researched book which gets across how much more there was to Harvey than just the circulation of the blood. His family, his work on the development of the embryo, his role as a physician to King Charles I, and his encounters with witches – a great story – as well as a convincing sense of the sort of man he was and of the times in which he lived.