Butcher, penned by the gifted Joyce Carol Oates, is an extraordinary and arresting novel set against the backdrop of a women's asylum in the 19th century. This harrowing tale draws upon authentic historical documents to weave a narrative around Dr. Silas Weir, known as "The Father of Gyno-Psychiatry." After a disastrous procedure that tarnishes his reputation, Weir finds himself at the New Jersey Asylum for Female Lunatics, where his rule is absolute.
Within these walls, Dr. Weir operates without restraint, gaining notoriety for his work with women neglected by the state. His career is marked by grotesque experiments, particularly focused on a young Irish indentured servant named Brigit. Brigit becomes both the centerpiece of Weir's experiments and the catalyst for his eventual downfall.
The story is narrated by Weir's eldest son, who has denounced the cruel legacy of his father. Butcher is a blend of fact and fiction, a chilling journey through the darkest corners of the American psyche, culminating in a startling conclusion that intertwines terror with an unexpected romance.
With Butcher, Joyce Carol Oates reaffirms her status as one of our premier American visionaries of the imagination.
Since his death in 1961 at the age of thirty-six, Frantz Fanon has loomed ever larger. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power have inspired radical movements across the world. But who was Frantz Fanon? In this searching biography, Adam Shatz tells the story of Fanon's stunning journey--from a civil servant's modest home in Martinique to fighting in the French Army during World War II, practicing psychiatry in rural France and Algeria, and joining the Algerian independence struggle, where he became a spokesman, diplomat, and clandestine strategist before his death at a military hospital in Maryland.
Shatz situates Fanon's writings in the context of his close and contested relations with the French intellectuals of his era, as well as his encounters with psychiatric patients, guerrilla fighters, and the early leaders of independent African states. Today, Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have become canonical texts of the Black and global radical imagination, comparable to James Baldwin's essays in their influence. And yet they are little understood. In The Rebel's Clinic, Shatz offers a dramatic reconstruction of Fanon's extraordinary life--and a guide to the books that underlie Black Lives Matter and other groups attempting to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism.
The Invisible Kingdom is a landmark exploration of one of the most consequential and mysterious issues of our time: the rise of chronic illness and autoimmune diseases.
A silent epidemic of chronic illnesses afflicts tens of millions of Americans. These are diseases that are poorly understood, frequently marginalized, and can go undiagnosed and unrecognized altogether. Renowned writer Meghan OâRourke delivers a revelatory investigation into this elusive category of âinvisibleâ illness that encompasses autoimmune diseases, post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, and now long COVID, synthesizing the personal and the universal to help all of us through this new frontier.
Drawing on her own medical experiences as well as a decade of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts, OâRourke traces the history of Western definitions of illness, and reveals how inherited ideas of cause, diagnosis, and treatment have led us to ignore a host of hard-to-understand medical conditions, ones that resist easy description or simple cures. As America faces this health crisis of extraordinary proportions, the populations most likely to be neglected by our institutions include women, the working class, and people of color.
Blending lyricism and erudition, candor and empathy, OâRourke brings together her deep and disparate talents and roles as critic, journalist, poet, teacher, and patient, synthesizing the personal and universal into one monumental project arguing for a seismic shift in our approach to disease. The Invisible Kingdom offers hope for the sick, solace and insight for their loved ones, and a radical new understanding of our bodies and our health.
Survivor Song thrusts us into a chillingly prescient tale of suspense and terror. Massachusetts is overwhelmed by a rabies-like virus, spread by saliva and with a terrifyingly short incubation period. The infected are driven to bite and infect as many others as they can before succumbing to the disease. Amidst the chaos, hospitals are inundated, and society crumbles as the government's emergency protocols falter.
Dr. Ramola "Rams" Sherman, a soft-spoken pediatrician, receives a frantic call from Natalie, a pregnant friend whose husband has been killed by an infected neighbor. Bitten herself, Natalie's only hope is to reach a hospital for the rabies vaccine. The clock is ticking for her and her unborn child.
What follows is a desperate odyssey through a landscape twisted into a barely recognizable terrain of danger and terror. Survivor Song is an all-too-plausible novel that not only races through the pages but shakes readers to their core, showcasing Paul Tremblay's mastery of the horror genre.
Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family unfolds the heartrending story of a mid-century American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understandâeven cureâthe disease.
Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the dream. After World War II, Don's work with the US Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years there was an established script for a family like the Galvinsâaspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmonyâand they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse.
By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen in one family? What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institutes of Mental Health.
Their shocking story also offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy and the premise of the schizophrenogenic mother, to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amidst profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. Unknown to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment and even the possibility of the eradication of the disease for future generations.
With clarity and compassion, bestselling and award-winning author Robert Kolker uncovers one family's unforgettable legacy of suffering, love and hope.
In In My Hands, surgical oncologist Dr. Steven Curley shares the empowering lessons he's learned over 25 years from his cancer patients' unique stories of struggle, perseverance, and triumph.
As Chief of Surgical Oncology at Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Steven Curley has worked with cancer patients for over two decades. While his life's work has been to help his patients live longer lives, he found that they helped him in ways he never could have expected.
In My Hands is a rare, often emotional look at some of Dr. Curley's real patients and real situations in modern cancer care. These stories of resilience, hope, and determination changed and inspired Dr. Curley, and he uses these same stories to encourage patients dealing with the fear and uncertainty coupled with a diagnosis of cancer.
Every story in the book has a theme inspired by his patients: Hope, Courage, Strength, Determination, Wonder, Cooperation, Creativity, Diligence, Service, Perseverance, Wisdom, Grace, Consideration, Gratitude, Discernment, Reverence, Resourcefulness, Faith, Beauty, Acceptance, and Empathy.
Some are positive messages, reminding us of the importance of maintaining balance between family, work, and leisure activities. Others are examples of the remarkable resilience of the human spirit when facing the reality of and the surgical risks that accompany a cancer diagnosis.
Realistically, despite remarkable advances in multidisciplinary cancer care, some remind us cancer is still a potentially lethal and destructive disease affecting patients and the family and friends supporting them. While many people are told that there is no hope in their situation, Dr. Curley's patients taught him to always provide hope, to push the envelope and give people a chance, and that hope is a critical component of treatment and care.
In My Hands is medical narrative at its finest, and provides insight into medicine and patient care along with fascinating details about one of our most feared diseases.
Unblinded is the true story of New Yorker Kevin Coughlin, who became blind at age thirty-six due to a rare genetic disorder known as Leberâs Hereditary Optic Neuropathy. Twenty years later, without medical intervention, Kevinâs sight miraculously started to return. He is the only known person in the world who has experienced a spontaneous, non-medically assisted, regeneration of the optic nerve.
Unblinded follows Kevinâs descent into darkness, and his unexplained reemergence to sight. It provides honest, profound insight into the emotional trauma that occurs when vision is lost and the path forward in life cannot be seen. The book offers a fascinating, behind-the-scenes tour of what went on during those years of darkness and how Kevin Coughlin, after battling alcoholism, loneliness, prejudice, and perhaps most of all himself, emerges as a man of wisdom and sight.
An incredible memoir from one of the worldâs most eminent heart surgeons, Professor Stephen Westaby, detailing some of the most remarkable and poignant cases he has worked on. Grim Reaper sits on the heart surgeon's shoulder. A slip of the hand and life ebbs away. The balance between life and death is so delicate, and the heart surgeon walks that rope between the two. In the operating room, there is no time for doubt. It is flesh, blood, rib-retractors, and pumping the vital organ with your bare hand to squeeze the life back into it. An off-day can have dire consequences â this job has a steep learning curve, and the cost is measured in human life. Cardiac surgery is not for the faint of heart.
Professor Westaby took chances and pushed the boundaries of heart surgery. He saved hundreds of lives over the course of a thirty-five-year career. Now, in his astounding memoir, Westaby details some of his most remarkable and poignant cases â such as the baby who had suffered multiple heart attacks by six months old, a woman who lived the nightmare of locked-in syndrome, and a man whose life was powered by a battery for eight years.
A powerful, important, and incredibly moving book, Fragile Lives offers an exceptional insight into the exhilarating and sometimes tragic world of heart surgery, and how it feels to hold someone's life in your hands.
For readers of Atul Gawande, Andrew Solomon, and Anne Lamott, When Breath Becomes Air is a profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir by a young neurosurgeon faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis who attempts to answer the question 'What makes a life worth living?'
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a naĂŻve medical student "possessed," as he wrote, "by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life" into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.
What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. "I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything," he wrote. "Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: 'I can't go on. I'll go on.'"
When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cellsâtaken without her knowledgeâbecame one of the most important tools in medicine. The first âimmortalâ human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, theyâd weigh more than 50 million metric tonsâas much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bombâs effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.
Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.
Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the âcoloredâ ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henriettaâs small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia â a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo â to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.
Henriettaâs family did not learn of her âimmortalityâ until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family â past and present â is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.
Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks familyâespecially Henriettaâs daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her motherâs cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldnât her children afford health insurance?
Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.
The Final Diagnosis is a captivating tale of life and death struggles set within the walls of a large American hospital. Joe Pearson, the chief pathologist, stands at the center of this drama. His role is pivotal as he makes the final diagnosis on every patient, and ultimately, on himself.
As changes loom over Three Counties Hospital, Dr. Kent OâDonnell, a dynamic and ambitious surgeon, takes on the challenge to modernize the institution. His efforts bring him face to face with Dr. Pearson, whose outdated methods are at odds with the hospital's new direction.
This novel, richly detailed and meticulously researched, unveils the professional, personal, and romantic challenges faced by those within the medical field. It is a place where life often begins and ends, filled with moments of joy and inevitable tragedy.
Lene Fogelberg is dyingâshe is sure of itâbut no doctor in Sweden, her home country, believes her. Love stories enfold her, with her husband, her two precious daughters, her enchanting surroundings, but the question she has carried in her heart since childhoodâWill I die young?âis threatening all she holds dear, even her sanity.
When her young family moves to the US, an answer, a diagnosis, is finally found: she is in the last stages of a fatal congenital heart disease. But is it too late?
A young woman risks everything to save her own life in this unusual, riveting medical drama crafted with deep emotion and exquisite detail.
The Hot Zone is a riveting account of the appearance of a highly infectious, deadly virus from the central African rain forest that suddenly emerges in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. With no cure available, the virus claims the lives of 90 percent of its victims in just a few days. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is deployed with the urgent mission to halt the outbreak of this exotic "hot" virus.
This dramatic narrative gives a hair-raising insight into the world of rare and lethal viruses and their impact on the human race. It's a chilling reminder that sometimes, the truth can be more terrifying than fiction. The Hot Zone is shocking, frightening, and utterly impossible to ignore.
On a lazy Sunday morning, two young people are wheeled into Room No. 509 of GKL super specialty hospital.
A brilliant nineteen-year-old medical student, suffering from an incurable, fatal disease, is hurtling towards a slow, painful, uncertain death.
A wasteful twenty-five-year-old drug addict, with no appreciation of life, finds every organ system of his body slowly shutting down.
Two prodigious doctors, fighting their own demons from the past, strive to keep these two patients alive, putting their medical licenses at risk. Death looms in the tiny 12x13-foot room as they fight for every breath of their lives, even as the doctors put them through unapproved experimental treatments to prolong their lives.
How will the last month of pain and struggle change their lives? How will it transform the doctors who work steadfastly to make them live a little longer?
Thousands of people have had near-death experiences, but scientists have argued that they are impossible. Dr. Eben Alexander was one of those scientists. A highly trained neurosurgeon, Alexander knew that NDEs feel real, but are simply fantasies produced by brains under extreme stress.
Then, Dr. Alexanderâs own brain was attacked by a rare illness. The part of the brain that controls thought and emotionâand in essence makes us humanâshut down completely. For seven days he lay in a coma. Then, as his doctors considered stopping treatment, Alexanderâs eyes popped open. He had come back.
Alexanderâs recovery is a medical miracle. But the real miracle of his story lies elsewhere. While his body lay in coma, Alexander journeyed beyond this world and encountered an angelic being who guided him into the deepest realms of super-physical existence. There he met, and spoke with, the Divine source of the universe itself.
Alexanderâs story is not a fantasy. Before he underwent his journey, he could not reconcile his knowledge of neuroscience with any belief in heaven, God, or the soul. Today Alexander is a doctor who believes that true health can be achieved only when we realize that God and the soul are real and that death is not the end of personal existence but only a transition.
This story would be remarkable no matter who it happened to. That it happened to Dr. Alexander makes it revolutionary. No scientist or person of faith will be able to ignore it. Reading it will change your life.
An unforgettable, illuminating story of how men live and how they survive, from Abraham Verghese, the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Cutting for Stone.
When Abraham Verghese, a physician whose marriage is unraveling, relocates to El Paso, Texas, he hopes to make a fresh start as a staff member at the county hospital. There he meets David Smith, a medical student recovering from drug addiction, and the two men begin a tennis ritual that allows them to shed their inhibitions and find security in the sport they love and with each other.
This friendship between doctor and intern grows increasingly rich and complex, more intimate than two men usually allow. Just when it seems nothing can go wrong, the dark beast from Davidâs past emerges once againâand almost everything Verghese has come to trust and believe in is threatened as David spirals out of control.
Compassionate and moving, The Tennis Partner is an unforgettable, illuminating story of friendship and loss.
Inspired by true events, The God Complex takes readers on a thrill ride through Chinese medicine. Discover the secrets of the Orient as you embark on a Da Vinci-style adventure. Follow along as a dynamic conspiracy ensues, pitting Eastern medicine against its critics in the West. Each clue brings you one step closer to solving the mystery and uncovering an ancient secret that connects Chinese medicine to martial arts.
SETTING: The God Complex is set in Prague and serves as a surrogate tour guide, offering readers a unique perspective of the city and its culture. Learn a few Czech words, dishes, and customs before arriving. Find the restaurants described inside and dine with locals. Perfect reading for your flight. Turn your trip to Prague into an adventure.
Cutting for Stone is a sweeping, emotionally riveting first novel that spans continents and generations, telling the enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home.
Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their motherâs death in childbirth and their fatherâs disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be love, not politicsâtheir passion for the same womanâthat will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to himânearly destroying himâMarion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.
An unforgettable journey into one manâs remarkable life, and an epic story about the power, intimacy, and curious beauty of the work of healing others.
The Midwife is an unforgettable true story and the basis for the hit PBS drama Call the Midwife. At the age of twenty-two, Jennifer Worth leaves her comfortable home to move into a convent and become a midwife in post-war London's East End slums.
The colorful characters she meets while delivering babies all over Londonâfrom the plucky, warm-hearted nuns with whom she lives to the woman with twenty-four children who can't speak English to the prostitutes and dockers of the city's seedier sideâilluminate a fascinating time in history.
Beautifully written and utterly moving, The Midwife will touch the hearts of anyone who is, and everyone who has, a mother.
New Year's Eve, the last day of Virginia's bloodiest year since the Civil War. Dr. Kay Scarpetta plunges into the murky depths of a ship graveyard to recover the very human remains of Ted Eddings, an investigative reporter. What kind of story was Eddings chasing below the icy surface of the Elizabeth River? And why did Scarpetta receive a phone call from someone reporting the death before the police were notified?
She soon discovers that Eddings' murder is merely the first layer of something much deeper â a labyrinthine conspiracy that will put all of her criminal and forensic knowledge to the test like never before. For Scarpetta, the real challenge won't be cataloging the growing number of dead bodies, but preventing herself and those she loves from becoming the next victims.
She restores the light of hope. Dr. Alexandra Keller is Chicago's most brilliant reconstructive surgeon.
He dwells in shadow. Michael Cyprien is New Orleans's most reclusive millionaireâand in desperate need of Dr. Keller's skills.
A new dawn awaits them both.... Beneath the foundation of a mansion in the heart of the Garden District, Alexandra will perform an illegal surgery. Her patient's disfigurement is beyond medical repair, but his body's ability to recuperate from his wounds borders on the miraculous.
Alexandra knows Michael Cyprien is no ordinary patient. Intrigued by how his remarkable physiology might benefit medical science, she is even more compelled by his presenceâand the mystery surrounding him and his associates, a cadre of immortals who call themselves the Darkyn.
Four women with nothing in common, united only in death. Four brutalized victims of a brilliant monster - a "Mr. Nobody", moving undetected through a paralyzed city, leaving behind a gruesome trail of carnage... but few clues. With skilled hands, an unerring eye, and the latest advances in forensic research, an unrelenting female medical examiner - Kay Scarpetta - is determined to unmask a maniac. But someone is trying to sabotage Kay's investigation from the inside. And worse yet, someone wants her dead...
The blockbuster bestseller that kickstarted a new genre--the medical thriller--is now available in trade paperback for the first time. They called it "minor surgery," but Nancy Greenly, Sean Berman and a dozen others--all admitted to Boston Memorial Hospital for routine procedures--were victims of the same inexplicable, hideous tragedy on the operating table. They never woke up.
Susan Wheeler is a third-year medical student working as a trainee at Boston Memorial Hospital. Two patients during her residency mysteriously go into comas immediately after their operations due to complications from anesthesia. Susan begins to investigate the causes behind both of these alarming comas and discovers the oxygen line in Operating Room 8 has been tampered with to induce carbon monoxide poisoning.
Then Susan discovers the evil nature of the Jefferson Institute, an intensive care facility where patients are suspended from the ceiling and kept alive until they can be harvested for healthy organs. Is she a participant in--or a victim of--a large-scale black market dealing in human organs?
An orphan leaves Dark Ages London to study medicine in Persia in this ârichâ and âvividâ historical novel from a New York Timesâbestselling author. A child holds the hand of his dying mother and is terrified, aware something is taking her. Orphaned and given to an itinerant barber-surgeon, Rob Cole becomes a fast-talking swindler, peddling a worthless medicine. But as he matures, his strange giftâan acute sensitivity to impending deathânever leaves him, and he yearns to become a healer.
Arab madrassas are the only authentic medical schools, and he makes his perilous way to Persia. Christians are barred from Muslim schools, but claiming he is a Jew, he studies under the worldâs most renowned physician, Avicenna. How the woman who is his great love struggles against her only rivalâmedicineâmakes a riveting modern classic. The Physician is the first book in New York Timesâbestselling author Noah Gordonâs Dr. Robert Cole trilogy, which continues with Shaman and concludes with Matters of Choice.
In Sunderland, England, a city quarantined by the cholera epidemic of 1831, a defiant, fifteen-year old beauty in an elegant blue dress makes her way between shadow and lamp light. A potter's assistant by day and dress lodger by night, Gustine sells herself for necessity in a rented gown, scrimping to feed and protect her only love: her fragile baby boy.
She holds a glimmer of hope after meeting Dr. Henry Chiver, a prisoner of his own dark past. But in a world where suspicion of medicine runs rampant like a fever, these two lost souls will become irrevocably linked, as each crosses lines between rich and destitute, decorum and abandon, damnation and salvation.
By turns tender and horrifying, The Dress Lodger is a captivating historical thriller charged with a distinctly modern voice.
âLocked-in syndrome: paralysed from head to toe, the patient, his mind intact, is imprisoned inside his own body, unable to speak or move. In my case, blinking my left eyelid is my only means of communication.â
In December 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor-in-chief of French âElleâ and the father of two young children, suffered a massive stroke and found himself paralysed and speechless, but entirely conscious, trapped by what doctors call âlocked-in syndromeâ. Using his only functioning muscle â his left eyelid â he began dictating this remarkable story, painstakingly spelling it out letter by letter.
His book offers a haunting, harrowing look inside the cruel prison of locked-in syndrome, but it is also a triumph of the human spirit.
Three young doctorsâtheir hopes, their dreams, their unexpected desires...
Dr. Paige Taylor: She swore it was euthanasia, but when Paige inherited a million dollars from a patient, the D.A. called it murder.
Dr. Kat Hunter: She vowed never to let another man too close againâuntil she accepted the challenge of a deadly bet.
Dr. Honey Taft: To make it in medicine, she knew she'd need something more than the brains God gave her.
Racing from the life-and-death decisions of a big major hospital to the tension-packed fireworks of a murder trial, Nothing Lasts Forever lays bare the ambitions and fears of healers and killers, lovers and betrayers.
Cancer Ward examines the relationship of a group of people in the cancer ward of a provincial Soviet hospital in 1955, two years after Stalin's death. We see them under normal circumstances, and also reexamined at the eleventh hour of illness. Together they represent a remarkable cross-section of contemporary Russian characters and attitudes.
The experiences of the central character, Oleg Kostoglotov, closely reflect the author's own: Solzhenitsyn himself became a patient in a cancer ward in the mid-1950s, on his release from a labor camp, and later recovered. Translated by Nicholas Bethell and David Burg.
Writing with all the passion of Love Story and the power of The Class, Erich Segal sweeps us into the lives of the Harvard Medical School's class of 1962. His stunning novel reveals the making of doctorsâwhat makes them tick, scheme, hurt . . . and love.
From the crucible of med schoolâs merciless training through the demanding hours of internship and residency to the triumphsâand sometimes tragediesâbeyond, Doctors brings to vivid life the men and women who seek to heal but who must first walk through fire.
At the novelâs heart is the unforgettable relationship of Barney Livingston and Laura Castellano, childhood friends who separately find unsettling celebrity and unsatisfying loveâuntil their friendship ripens into passion. Yet even their devotion to each other, even their medical gifts may not be enough to save the one life they treasure above all others.
Doctors is a vibrant portrait that culminates in a murder, a trial . . . and a miracle.
Oxygen is a riveting novel by a real-life anesthesiologist, an intimate story of relationships and family that collides with a high-stakes medical drama.
Dr. Marie Heaton is an anesthesiologist at the height of her profession. She has worked, lived, and breathed her career since medical school, and she now practices at a top Seattle hospital. Marie has carefully constructed her life according to empirical truths, to the science and art of medicine. But when her tried-and-true formula suddenly deserts her during a routine surgery, she must explain the nightmarish operating room disaster and face the resulting malpractice suit.
Marie's best friend, colleague, and former lover, Dr. Joe Hillary, becomes her closest confidante as she twists through depositions, accusations, and a remorseful preoccupation with the mother of the patient in question. As she struggles to salvage her career and reputation, Marie must face hard truths about the path she's chosen, the bridges she's burned, and the colleagues and superiors she's mistaken for friends.
A quieter crisis is simultaneously unfolding within Marie's family. Her aging father is losing his sight and approaching an awkward dependency on Marie and her sister, Lori. Although Marie has been estranged from her Texas roots for decades, the ultimate responsibility for their father's care is falling on her.
As her carefully structured life begins to collapse, Marie confronts questions of love and betrayal, family bonds, and the price of her own choices. Set against the natural splendor of Seattle, and inside the closed vaults of hospital operating rooms, Oxygen climaxes in a final twist that is as heartrending as it is redeeming.
A minor road accident landed county prosecutor Katie DeMaio in Westlake Hospital. That night, from her window, she thought she saw a man load a woman's body into the trunk of a car... or was it just a sleeping pill-induced nightmare?
At work the next day, Katie began investigating a suicide that looked more like murder. Initial evidence pointed elsewhere, but medical examiner Richard Carroll saw a trail leading to Dr. Edgar Highley. He suspected that the famous doctor's work "curing" infertile women was more than controversialâthat it was deceitful, depraved, and often deadly.
But before Richard could tell Katie his fears, she left the office for the weekend and an appointment for routine surgery... in Dr. Highley's operating room.
The classic multimillion copy bestseller
Delve into the magical, unforgettable world of James Herriot, the world's most beloved veterinarian, and his menagerie of heartwarming, funny, and tragic animal patients.
For over forty years, generations of readers have thrilled to Herriot's marvelous tales, deep love of life, and extraordinary storytelling abilities. For decades, Herriot roamed the remote, beautiful Yorkshire Dales, treating every patient that came his way from smallest to largest, and observing animals and humans alike with his keen, loving eye.
In All Creatures Great and Small, we meet the young Herriot as he takes up his calling and discovers that the realities of veterinary practice in rural Yorkshire are very different from the sterile setting of veterinary school. Some visits are heart-wrenchingly difficult, such as one to an old man in the village whose very ill dog is his only friend and companion, some are lighthearted and fun, such as Herriot's periodic visits to the overfed and pampered Pekinese Tricki Woo who throws parties and has his own stationery, and yet others are inspirational and enlightening, such as Herriot's recollections of poor farmers who will scrape their meager earnings together to be able to get proper care for their working animals. From seeing to his patients in the depths of winter on the remotest homesteads to dealing with uncooperative owners and critically ill animals, Herriot discovers the wondrous variety and never-ending challenges of veterinary practice as his humor, compassion, and love of the animal world shine forth.