Showing titles in Medical

In 2018, Alastair McAlpine, a palliative paediatrician in Cape Town, decided to share some inspiring thoughts from the children in his care. He posted: ‘I asked some of my terminal paediatric palliative care patients what they had enjoyed in life, and what gave it meaning. Kids can be so wise...

A mesmerizing biography of the brilliant and eccentric medical innovator who revolutionized American surgery and founded the country’s most famous museum of medical oddities Imagine undergoing an operation without anesthesia performed by a surgeon who refuses to sterilize his tools—or even...

Imagine a young doctor, trained in the latest medical knowledge and state-of-the-art equipment, suddenly transported back to one of the world’s most isolated and unforgiving environments - Nome, Alaska. That’s what happen to Dr. Sims. His plans to become a pediatric surgeon were drastically changed when, on the eve of being drafted into the army to serve as a MASH surgeon in Vietnam, he was offered a commission in the US Public Health for assignment in Anchorage, Alaska, where he was scheduled to act as chief of pediatrics at the Alaska Native Medical Center.

Recalling remarkable cases - and people - from a career launched in the first days of Emergency Medicine, Dr. Paul Seward leads us in his memoir through suspenseful diagnoses and explorations of anatomy. Within the conditions of great stress and rapid decision-making that are routine in the ER, Dr. Seward tells us that medical staff must be more than technicians of the body: They must be restorers of the human.

The Elephant Man is Treves' own firsthand account of how he met and befriended Joseph Merrick (whom he mistakenly calls John Merrick), a young man with very severe physical deformities, who was being exhibited as a sideshow freak, as half man, half elephant. Treves initially invited Merrick to his rooms in the London Hospital so as to examine him, and to ensure Merrick's admittance he gave him his card.

On the evening of 10 August 2017, liquid oxygen ran out at the state-run Baba Raghav Das Medical College’s Nehru Hospital in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh. Reportedly, over the next two days, more than 80 patients–63 children and 18 adults–lost their lives. In the intervening hours, Dr Kafeel Khan, the junior-most lecturer at the college’s paediatrics department, went to extraordinary lengths to secure oxygen cylinders, perform emergency treatment and rally the staff in order to prevent as many deaths as possible.

The Lobotomist explores one of the darkest chapters of American medicine: the desperate attempt to treat the hundreds of thousands of psychiatric patients in need of help during the middle decades of the 20th century. Into this crisis stepped Walter Freeman, MD, who saw a solution in lobotomy, a brain operation intended to reduce the severity of psychotic symptoms. Drawing on Freeman's documents and interviews with Freeman's family, Jack El-Hai takes a penetrating look at the life and work of this complex scientific genius. 

For nearly 30 years, James has kept his inner demons trapped in his own mind. Until one day his mental health got the better of him and there was nothing he could do to hold the memories in anymore. He did not know how to tell anyone, being scared of the social stigma attached and what others would think of him if they knew his past. So James decided to write it all down to share with the world.

'Electric with insight' - Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering Emmeline Clein's own history of disordered eating began when she was just twelve. In Dead Weight, alongside her own experience and through the stories of other women – famous figures from across time and popular culture, and...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Tell Me the Planets by Ben Platts-Mills, read by Sam Woolf. Matthew has a meticulously logical mind. He is intelligent, compassionate and fiercely loyal. He also has a brain injury. When Matthew underwent surgery to remove a life-threatening cyst in the...

How does it feel to hold someone's life in your hands? What is it like to cut into someone else's body? What is it like to stand by, powerless, while someone dies because of the incompetence of your seniors? How do you tell a beautiful young man who seems perfectly fit that he has only a few days left to live? Gabriel Weston worked in the big-city hospitals of the 21st century; a woman in a place dominated by Alpha males. Her world was one of disease, suffering and extraordinary pressure where a certain moral ambiguity and clinical detachment were necessary tools for survival.

Cameron West was in his thirties, a successful businessman, happily married and the father of a young son when he spoke these words. The “voice” he heard belonged to Davy, the first of twenty-four alter personalities to emerge over a period of several months as West began to recall memories of horrific abuse he’d repressed since childhood. With distinct characteristics, mannerisms, and memories, all twenty-four were created by West to protect his psyche from the trauma of repeated sexual abuse at the hands of family members.

In Origin Story, medical historian Howard Markel recounts the two-year period (1858 to 1860) of Darwin's writing of On the Origin of Species through its spectacular success and controversy. Simultaneously, Markel delves into the mysterious health symptoms Darwin developed, combing the literature to emerge with a cogent diagnosis of a case that has long fascinated medical historians.

A neurobiologist reexamines the personal nature of perception in this groundbreaking guide to a new model for our senses. We think of perception as a passive, mechanical process, as if our eyes are cameras and our ears microphones. But as neurobiologist Susan R. Barry argues, perception is a...

As an Emergency Medicine consultant in one of the busiest departments in the United Kingdom, Dr. Jonny Acheson loved his job. Fueled by adrenaline, he treated and cared for some of the sickest patients who came through the doors. In 2016, when he was forty-one, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's, a progressive neurological condition for which there is no cure. He found it increasingly difficult to multitask in his fast-paced world. The environment that he thrived in made his symptoms worse. Parkinson's challenged his professional identity as an emergency doctor, and he didn't know what to do.

Almost six million Americans―about one in every ten people over the age of sixty-five―have Alzheimer’s disease or related dementias, and this number is projected to more than double by 2050. What is it like to live with and amid this increasingly prevalent condition―an affliction that some fear more than death? In My Father’s Brain, the distinguished physician and author Sandeep Jauhar set his father’s descent into Alzheimer’s alongside his own journey toward understanding this disease and how it might best be coped with, if not cured.

Dean Braxton was hospitalized due to kidney stones. The procedure to break down the stones caused an infection which eventually made his heart stop. When Dean died, he was taken to heaven, where he met Jesus, family members, and saw God, the father of creation! He should have been a vegetable or dead, when in fact Dean Braxton's heart had been stopped for 1 hour and 45 minutes. After he came back from heaven, he was instantly healed of 29 medical conditions, and today he is called the Miracle Man, and has written a book of his complete account of heaven in the afterlife.

National Bestseller Winner of the 2017 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction Shortlisted for the 2018 RBC Taylor Prize Shortlisted for the 2018 Trillium Book Award Shortlisted for the 2018 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction Longlisted for the 2018 B.C. National Award for...

Try to imagine the city of Malaga is to be evacuated overnight. A total of 150,000 people will have to walk 200 kilometers along the coastal road in search of a safe refuge while being pursued by Italian tanks, bombed by German aircraft, and shelled by Rebel Nationalist ships. Many will be too weak to reach the safe port of Almería and will only survive because an ambulance and a Canadian doctor come to help. A doctor who will later be accused of spying and betrayal and will be unwillingly pushed out of Spain by the very people he had come to assist.

Mark Vonnegut set out in search of Eden with his VW bug, his girlfriend, his dog, and his ideals, but genetic predisposition and a whole lot of shit going down made him crazy in a culture that told him mental illness is a myth and schizophrenia is a sane response to an insane society. Describing his experiences during the late '60s and early '70s, Eden Express reveals how Mark went from being a recent college grad who was in love and living communally on a farm to having nervous breakdowns.