Graphic Medicine and Other Media

This exploration begins when Dr. Jerome Groopman was a medical student, ignorant of the vital role of hope in patients’ lives–and it culminates in his remarkable quest to delineate a biology of hope. With appreciation for the human elements and the science, Groopman explains how to distinguish true hope from false hope–and how to gain an honest understanding of the reach and limits of this essential emotion.

Anyone who's had to care for an aging parent knows the difficulty of deciding when it's time to consider a nursing home or hospice. In Being Mortal, the ever thoughtful surgeon and author Atul Gawande asks us to think about what it really means to age gracefully and die with dignity when modern medicine can do so much to extend life.

Some of the stories in Calypso are wonderfully absurd, like the one in which he attempts to feed his own fatty tumor to a snapping turtle. Other stories are bleak, hilarious and moving. His ruminations on his sister's suicide, his ailing father and his mother's alcoholism draw on a pathos we haven't seen from Sedaris before; it's a new depth that makes this particular collection essential. -Jessica Reedy

Culinary historian Michael W. Twitty brings a fresh perspective to our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry—both black and white—through food, from Africa to America and from slavery to freedom...Twitty travels from the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields to tell of the struggles his family faced and how food enabled his ancestors’ survival across three centuries. He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and visits Civil War battlefields in Virginia, synagogues in Alabama, and black-owned organic farms in Georgia.

Maya Dusenbery brings together scientific and sociological research, interviews with experts within and outside the medical establishment, and personal stories from regular women to provide the first comprehensive, accessible look at how sexism in medicine harms women today.

She begins with an account of her experiences working as a “medical actor,” performing as patients with baffling ailments that medical students must diagnose, encounters that deliver the realization that empathy requires humility and imagination. She discloses her own medical travails and asks, “When does empathy actually reinforce the pain it wants to console?” -Donna Seaman

In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as “wrenching and revelatory” (The Nation), “vivid and unsettling” (New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of 21st-century America’s most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.

After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths. She unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, of a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing. In this book, she exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals just how ill-prepared we are in America for the impact of large-scale disasters, and how we can do better.

Siddhartha Mukherjee is a first-rate science writer, who makes even the trickiest bits of biology easy to understand. But The Gene, his disarming study of what's known and believed about inheritance, is really a story about people — about the way blind luck, missed opportunities and misguided ambition can win or lose the day in scientific research and life. "Science is an endurance sport," Mukherjee writes. Take, for example, Austrian monk Gregor Mendel, who planted his famous peas only after twice failing his exams to teach high school science. There is much humor and warmth in Mukherjee's book, but he also chronicles the devastating history of eugenics. For anyone eager to learn more about the real promise and limits of "personalized medicine," to understand where we've been and where we're headed, The Gene is an insightful guide. -Deb Franklin

At 6am on 28 August 1854, the city of London struggled to sleep at the end of an oppressively hot summer. But at 40 Broad Street, Soho, Sarah Lewis was awake tending to her feverish baby girl. As she threw a used bucket of water into the cesspool at the front of her lodgings, it marked the start of a cholera epidemic that would consume 50,000 lives in England and Wales - and become a battle between man and microbe unlike any other. And at the heart of the story is Doctor John Snow: vegetarian, teetotaller, anaesthesiologist and Soho resident, whose use of maps to prove that cholera was spread by water - and not borne on the air as most believed - would bring him into conflict with the entire medical establishment, but ultimately defeat his era's greatest killer.

a singular adventure into the experience of various altered states of consciousness, along with a dive deep into both the latest brain science and the thriving underground community of psychedelic therapists. Pollan sifts the historical record to separate the truth about these mysterious drugs from the myths that have surrounded them since the 1960s, when a handful of psychedelic evangelists catalyzed a powerful backlash against what was then a promising field of research. A unique and elegant blend of science, memoir, travel writing, history, and medicine, How to Change Your Mind is a triumph of participatory journalism. By turns dazzling and edifying, it is the gripping account of a journey to an exciting and unexpected new frontier in our understanding of the mind, the self, and our place in the world.

"After I was raped I needed comfort. ... I felt so weak and I felt so powerless, and I wanted to make myself bigger. And so I would overeat, and I would get quite a lot of comfort from that, and when you are 12 and 13 and 14 and 15 and a sheltered kid from the suburbs, you don't really have access to vices other than food, and so I ate. My body was only a problem when the outside world intruded. I was very scared of boys, but I was also a reader and very romantic and very much interested in someone loving me, and so I had those yearnings but I didn't allow them to go beyond this idea of being loved. When I would look at myself I knew I was getting bigger. And I could tell that I was so much bigger than my peers, and I knew that was a problem, at least in terms of social standing, but I didn't feel any self-loathing. I didn't really feel any shame until people in my life forced me to feel shame because they were ashamed of my body, or they were disgusted by my body."

“This oft-quoted all-time favorite of the medical community will gladden–and strengthen–the hearts of patients, doctors, and anyone entering medical study, internship, or practice. With unassailable logic and rapier wit, the sage Dr. Oscar London muses on the challenges and joys of doctoring, and imparts timeless truths, reality checks, and poignant insights gleaned from 30 years of general practice–while never taking himself (or his profession) too seriously.”

Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales remain, in Dr. Sacks’s splendid and sympathetic telling, deeply human. They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity, and they enable us to enter the world of the neurologically impaired, to imagine with our hearts what it must be to live and feel as they do. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine’s ultimate responsibility: “the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject.”

Nestled in the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee, the town of Johnson City had always seemed exempt from the anxieties of modern American life. But when the local hospital treated its first AIDS patient, a crisis that had once seemed an “urban problem” had arrived in the town to stay. Working in Johnson City was Abraham Verghese, a young Indian doctor specializing in infectious diseases. Dr. Verghese became by necessity the local AIDS expert, soon besieged by a shocking number of male and female patients whose stories came to occupy his mind, and even take over his life. Verghese brought a singular perspective to Johnson City: as a doctor unique in his abilities; as an outsider who could talk to people suspicious of local practitioners; above all, as a writer of grace and compassion who saw that what was happening in this conservative community was both a medical and a spiritual emergency.

Schulte's findings are illuminating, puzzling, and, at times, maddening: Being overwhelmed is even affecting the size of our brains. But she also encounters signs of real progress―evidence that what the ancient Greeks called "the good life" is attainable after all. Schulte talks to companies who are inventing a new kind of workplace; travels to countries where policies support office cultures that don't equate shorter hours with laziness (and where people actually get more done); meets couples who have figured out how to share responsibilities. Enlivened by personal anecdotes, humor, and hope, Overwhelmed is a book about modern life―a revelation of the misguided beliefs and real stresses that have made leisure feel like a thing of the past, and of how we can find time for it in the present.

The untold story of how poison rocked Jazz Age New York City. A pair of forensic scientists began their trailblazing chemical detective work, fighting to end an era when untraceable poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime. Chief medical examiner Charles Norris and toxicologist Alexander Gettler investigate a family mysteriously stricken bald, factory workers with crumbling bones, a diner serving poisoned pies, and many others. Each case presents a deadly new puzzle and Norris and Gettler create revolutionary experiments to tease out even the wiliest compounds from human tissue

What does it mean to devote yourself wholly to helping others? In Strangers Drowning, Larissa MacFarquhar seeks out people living lives of extreme ethical commitment and tells their deeply intimate stories; their stubborn integrity and their compromises; their bravery and their recklessness; their joys and defeats and wrenching dilemmas.

For many Americans, skipping trips to the dentist isn't about forgoing pearly whites worthy of an actor's headshot. It's about being unable to get basic care. Almost 20 percent of children in the U.S. have untreated cavities; the number's higher for adults. Mary Otto, a former Washington Post reporter, doesn't just dwell on the numbers – she makes what could have been a turgid health policy tome spark with outrage over the stories of people who have suffered, including Deamonte Driver, a 12-year-old Maryland boy who died from an infection caused by one neglected tooth. -Nancy Shute

An essential book for health professionals who want to be part of the solution to America's care gaps. Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue.