I’m a fiction writer interested in exploring big historical moments through the lives of ordinary people. The extensive fight for reproductive rights and bodily autonomy for women, specifically black women, has long been a concern, admittedly for selfish reasons. This ever-shifting terrain—from eugenics and sterilization to coerced birth control and the rise in maternal mortality rates—was initially perplexing to me and it took a great deal of reading to make sense of it. Such research not only informed my historical novel, Night Wherever We Go, but much of how I understand the world. I’d argue one can’t fully comprehend the current abortion rights moment without understanding how race and reproduction are so deeply intertwined.
Schwartz’s book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how central black women’s reproduction was to the project of American slavery.
The book illustrates how new doctors needing specialization and clientele found common cause with slaveholders’ needs to control the reproductive capabilities of their enslaved workforce. The ongoing conflicts between slaveholders, enslaved women, and the doctors who were employed to thwart any attempts of resistance and autonomy on their part is truly mind-blowing.
Anyone tracking our current state of affairs post the Dobbs decision, with doctors in states like Texas being forced to choose between providing women necessary healthcare or complying with state law, can see the looming shadow of the history explored in Schwartz’s illuminating book.
The deprivations and cruelty of slavery have overshadowed our understanding of the institution's most human dimension: birth. We often don't realize that after the United States stopped importing slaves in 1808, births were more important than ever; slavery and the southern way of life could continue only through babies born in bondage.
In the antebellum South, slaveholders' interest in slave women was matched by physicians struggling to assert their own professional authority over childbirth, and the two began to work together to increase the number of infants born in the slave quarter. In unprecedented ways, doctors tried to manage the…
I am the former president of Pfizer Global Research, where I led research groups around the globe in finding new medicines to treat cancer, addiction, AIDS, immunological diseases, and pain. After retiring from Pfizer, I have been closely involved with biotech companies that also are seeking breakthrough drugs. This industry is a crucial part of the healthcare ecosystem, as evidenced by the remarkable response and, ultimately, the crushing of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, it is not just underappreciated but is treated with scorn by many. This booklist provides sources from which the reader can gain a full understanding of the value of the biopharmaceutical industry, the challenges it faces, and its importance to the world’s health.
The biopharmaceutical industry needs great young scientists. I often get asked by science majors as to whether they should consider a job in this industry and how to be successful in it. For these folks, I recommend Creating Cures, which is a thoughtful and thorough description of a career that combines doing great science with an eye on the business of developing great new medicines.
Reading this book could help you land the job of a lifetime.
I have long been drawn to everyday experiences in courts. Since Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, I’ve been writing and teaching about courts, social welfare, and disasters in a changing climate. Following the disasters requires noticing the routine cases filed, not only the notable constitutional claims the United States Supreme Court hears. That can be hard to do, because all the cases filed are not listed in any one place. In the pandemic, my interest in the more ordinary met the databases that people assembled, gathering as best possible the many cases filed about the pandemic.
The 1918 flu killed millions, including 675,000 in the United States. It rapidly killed young people. The president of the United States never spoke of it.
The United States was at war, and officials claimed speaking of the flu would undermine the war effort. Not speaking of the flu fit well with widespread suppression of speech, which officials also justified by pointing to the war. Civil rights and liberties claims linked to that pandemic as it did in COVID-19.
Mr. Barry’s sprawling story includes many actors. Mr. Barry argues that managing a pandemic requires trust. In the COVID-19 pandemic, trust could still be hard to come by, even as medical care, labor, insurance, schooling, and the place of courts had changed over the intervening one hundred years.
At the height of WWI, history's most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease. Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research and now revised to reflect the growing danger of the avian flu, "The Great Influenza"…
What happens when a novelist with a “razor-sharp wit” (Newsday), a “singular sensibility” (Huff Post), and a lifetime of fear about getting sick finds a lump where no lump should be? Months of medical mishaps, coded language, and Doctors who don't get it.
With wisdom, self-effacing wit, and the story-telling artistry of an acclaimed novelist, Elizabeth Benedict recollects her cancer diagnosis after discovering multiplying lumps in her armpit. In compact, explosive chapters, interspersed with moments of self-mocking levity, she chronicles her illness from muddled diagnosis to “natural remedies,” to debilitating treatments, as she gathers sustenance from family, an assortment of urbane friends, and a fearless “cancer guru.”
Rewriting Illness is suffused with suspense, secrets, and the unexpected solace of silence.
By turns somber and funny but above all provocative, Elizabeth Benedict's Rewriting Illness: A View of My Own is a most unconventional memoir. With wisdom, self-effacing wit, and the story-telling skills of a seasoned novelist, she brings to life her cancer diagnosis and committed hypochondria. As she discovers multiplying lumps in her armpit, she describes her initial terror, interspersed with moments of self-mocking levity as she indulges in "natural remedies," among them chanting Tibetan mantras, drinking shots of wheat grass, and finding medicinal properties in chocolate babka. She tracks the progression of her illness from muddled diagnosis to debilitating treatment…
I am a teacher and writer, drawn to the topic of synchronicity because I have experienced so many remarkable coincidences during my life that it seems I have no choice but to study them. As a young man, I spent much time working with dreams, coming to understand them especially through Carl Jung’s explorations of archetypes, myths, and the deep unconscious. This led naturally to the study of synchronicity. I am also interested in the related topic of consciousness and have written several books about it. Out of all this I have come to see the cosmos as a strangely mysterious and wonderfully orchestrated community of beings and events.
Deepak Chopra gives us a lovingly personal and spiritual perspective of synchronicity. On the practical side, it offers a variety of exercises to help the reader discover the power of synchronicity in his or her own life. In essence, however, it is simply about noticing the organizing intelligence seen through synchronistic events and inviting it into your life. In Chopra’s own words, “You don’t have to assign a specific meaning or interpretation to the coincidences, just … gently appreciate the cosmic coordination of your life with everything else.” This is a book that has changed the lives of its readers.
Dr Deepak Chopra, the bestselling pioneer in mind/body medicine, shows how coincidences are messages about the miraculous potential of each moment. He reveals how, through understanding the forces that shape coincidences, you can learn to live at a deeper level and access the flow of synchronicity that lies at the heart of existence. You can start to transform your life through full-contact living, in which all things will be within your reach.
Discover: - That there's no such thing as a meaningless coincidence - The seven principles of synchrodestiny - Practical techniques for applying those principles
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6, 8, and 14-year-old's favorite books.
Why did Nicole love this book?
The authors wanted to understand why compassion and empathy had left the hearts of healthcare workers and find ways to revive them. To do this, Dr. Trzeciak took two years off work to study the literature on compassion and empathy in medicine.
His book, full of powerful examples, makes us understand the importance of compassion as a therapeutic tool, which has the advantage of being free and universal. His approach leads him to conclude that it only takes a few seconds in a medical interview for compassion to live on with all its magical effects.
A must-read for all healthcare professionals and their patients.
A 34-year-old man fighting for his life in the Intensive Care Unit is on an artificial respirator for over a month. Could it be that his chance of getting off the respirator is not how much his nurses know, but rather how much they care?
A 75-year-old woman is heroically saved by a major trauma center only to be discharged and fatally struck by a car while walking home from the hospital. Could a lack of compassion from the hospital staff have been a factor in her death?
Compelling new research shows that health care is in the midst of…
I used to think one had to choose a career and work at it, giving up the parts of himself that didn’t fit neatly into that category. I was wrong. As a man in my late thirties, I am an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, but I’m also a writer. It’s books like the ones I’ve recommended here that convinced me that one does not need to turn off the parts of himself that are creative in order to be a doctor or even a grown-up. In fact, cultivating those same parts can be additive to this whole experience of being an adult.
Dr. Koven and I are on the same broad faculty at Harvard Medical School, though we had never crossed paths until our medical memoirs were released the same year. I got to know her a bit in that time, but even more so in the pages of her wonderful memoir, Letter to a Young Female Physician. This book so clearly elucidates and humanizes the complex path of becoming a physician as a woman and the lessons she learned along the way. Its pages are as charming as they are poignant.
In 2017, Dr Suzanne Koven published an essay describing the challenges faced by women doctors, including her own personal struggle with "imposter syndrome"-a long-held, secret belief that she was not clever enough or good enough to be a "real" doctor. Accessed nearly 300,000 times by readers around the world, Koven's Letter to a Young Female Physician has evolved into a work that reflects on her career in medicine, in which women still encounter sexism, pay inequity and harassment. Koven tells engaging stories about her pregnancy during a gruelling residency in the AIDS era; the illnesses of her son and parents…
As a cancer doctor, I have spent two decades dedicated to understanding the causes and therapy of cancer, how my patients experience their diagnosis and treatment, and how meaningful improvements in their experience should be reflected in the criteria we use to approve cancer drugs approval in the U.S., to improve their lives. In over 100 essays published in outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post and in two books, I sing the stories of my patients as I learn from their undaunted spirits and their utter humanity, as I try to figure out how to be a better doctor, and a better person.
If you ever need to go to the emergency room, you would want Jay Baruch to be your doctor.
In Tornado of Life, Jay explores medicine as an exercise in storytelling, and across a series of essays, tries to find truth in the stories his patients tell him.
With each patient we encounter, we struggle along with Jay to solve the moral quandaries of medical practice in the 21st century, and share in the heartache faced by the families surviving medical catastrophes.
Stories from the ER: a doctor shows how empathy, creativity, and imagination are the cornerstones of clinical care.
To be an emergency room doctor is to be a professional listener to stories. Each patient presents a story; finding the heart of that story is the doctor’s most critical task. More technology, more tests, and more data won’t work if doctors get the story wrong. Empathy, creativity, and imagination are the cornerstones of clinical care. In Tornado of Life, ER physician Jay Baruch offers a series of short, powerful, and affecting essays that capture the stories of ER patients in all…
I am a paramedic. I like being a medic. Not so much because of the science and medicine related to the job, but I like connecting with people. People from every walk of life. I like the chaos and unpredictability of the streets. The books on my list portray what it’s like to be out there. Not just war stories. But stories of humility and grace.
People Care is a book that should be given to every EMT and medic student. Caregivers in the field would also do well to read it. There are two sides to emergency medicine: There is the bit about interpreting ECGs, poking people with needles and splinting mangled bones—and there is the human side; treating people like people, not just “patients”. People Care is about the latter.
Without getting overly sappy, People Care is full of reminders and tips that can reel a salty provider back from the edge. I read this book with about eight years in EMS under my belt and it gave me a lot to think about and changed the way I work.
EMS texts have grown in size from 200 pages to more than 2,000. But they still don’t mention fear, kindness, gentleness, compassion, love, or tolerance for some of the mindless stupidity and pure meanness we all see daily. Reinforced by advice from dozens of master-level caregivers, this newest edition of People Care explains how to harness and employ the most powerful therapeutic instruments in medicine – our intuition, our empathy, our words and our behaviors – in service to people we’ve never met. And, how to love doing it for 20 years.
I am a mom who has struggled to understand the changes I have witnessed in my child after she told me she was “trans.” Nothing about her declaration or how she came to that point made sense to me. As a loving mother and curious person who loves to learn, I studied the topic of gender from multiple angles. As I recorded my research findings and experience, the content developed into a book. I provide a voice for parents who challenge transgender medicalization of cross-sex hormones and surgeries and instead desire natural options to treat the root cause of their child’s distress.
I read this book because I was curious about the detransition experience. I wanted to know the perspective of kids who chose to both transition and detransition. I felt compelled to hear their own words about what moved them to go in either direction. I also desired to learn about their lives as older adults and how their health and perspectives evolved with time.
I found each of the seven kids’ stories to be of value in growing my understanding beyond the parent perspective. As a mom of a daughter, I was also interested in learning why adolescent girls are more likely to become involved in the trans trend.
We live in unprecedented times, when what was known for thousands of years, that we are created male and female, is now up for debate. It is now controversial to see that sex is binary, that a man can never become a woman, nor a woman a man, and that men should not enter women's sports, women's bathrooms, and women's prisons, merely for saying that they are a woman. We are witnessing a rapid rise in gender confusion among young people, especially among young women and girls.
The Detransition Diaries is both personal and historical. It is personal in that…
I’m a lecturer in history at the University of Hertfordshire where I teach early modern history of medicine and the body. I have published on reproductive history in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The history of medicine is endlessly diverse, and there are so many books on early modern medicine, some broad and others more specific, it’s this variety that I find endlessly intriguing. Some conditions from the era, like gout and cancer, are familiar, while others like, greensickness, aren’t recognized any longer. Thinking about these differences and about how people’s bodies ached and suffered helps me to appreciate their relationships, struggles, and triumphs in a whole new dimension.
So many history books about medicine in the early modern period focus on London and other English urban centers. Withey’s book allows readers to move beyond the metropolis and glimpse sickness, disease, and medicine in a largely rural setting. It challenges readers to move beyond the concept that rural medicine was dominated by folklore and magic, Wales was not insular or remote but connected to broader medical trends in both Britain and Europe. This book illuminates how the ‘Welsh’ body was perceived: strong, robust, possessed of a hot choleric temperament, and a fondness for toasted cheese. And paints a clear picture of the men who made their living treating these bodies.
Physick and the family offers new insights into the early modern sickness experience, through a study of the medical history of Wales.
Newly available in paperback, this first ever monograph of early modern Welsh medicine utilises a large body of newly discovered source material. Using numerous approaches and methodologies, it makes a significant contribution to debates in medical history, including economies of knowledge, domestic medicine and care, material culture and the rural medical marketplace. Drawing on sources from probates to parish records, diaries to domestic remedy collections, Withey offers new directions for recovering the often obscure medical worldview of the…
