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Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry
A book about a barber, but a med student advised me to read it as a kind of doctor book. Jayber narrates a half century of executives supplanting farmers, tractors displacing mules, backhoes replacing shovels, and a man who walks away into the woods. Not backwards, but into a better economy, of barter, care, and…
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The Occasional Human Sacrifice, Carl Elliott
The truth does not always out. The righteous are rarely rewarded in the kingdom of academic medicine. For a quarter century now, Carl Elliott has been appealing to the conscience of medicine. Always coming after medicine at a slant, he can see what others cannot. For the first time, he writes about the company he…
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Accidental Kindness, Michael Stein
Medical training undoes you; it feels fitting that the binding in my copy of this memoir was so loose that every seventh page came clean out if I pulled upon it. And I found myself pulling because its pages were so finely-observed. Stein is the rare doctor who can see from the perspective of a…
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Within Reason, Sandro Galea
The first couple of weeks of the pandemic we sang solidarity songs. Before we had time for a second verse, the choir fractured into dissonant songs. Working in the hospital during those days was disorienting as people starting singing angry songs at each other: I-VER-MECTIN! MASK-ING! Galea wants to bring us back together around a…
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The Eden Express, Mark Vonnegut
Paperback in the back pocket of my jorts for the last week? This reminder that the counterculture cracked-up slowly, then all at once. Lot of talk these days that psychiatry neglects meaning. Here’s a little account of the problems of a multiplicity of meanings: “One thing that makes me suspicious is that everyone seems to…
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Personality Disorders, Allan V. Horwitz
Are we born this way? Aristotle thought we could learn habits, but his student Theophrastus believed our internal dynamics are constant. The debate ranges on, now operationalized in diagnostic manuals for personality disorders. No one is better than Horwitz at quickly laying out the debate, the limits of personality disorders, and the stalled development of…
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The Medical Imagination, Sari Altschuler
Genre is a strategy, Altschuler reminds us, and medicine has negotiated epistemic crises with a range of genres. Holmes made sense of anesthesia by writing novels. Rush imagined the sympathetic system as the republic. Poe negotiated epidemics with the Gothic. Altschuler reminds that we praise empiricism, but neglect the role of inspiration. It is fashionable…
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Twice As Hard, Jasmine Brown
Professionalization includes and excludes. The doors to the house of medicine for Black physicians, especially Black women, were barred during the Progressive Era. Remarkably, a few pioneers made their way to the bedside of patients despite many obstacles. Brown builds each chapter around the story of one of these pioneers. It’s a service to see…
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Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
Inside today’s academic medical centers, the talk is about generational differences. Work-life balance or fiduciary responsibility. Medicine is a job or a calling. Physicians should band together as union members or in professional guilds. Trainees should have stricter duty hours or live within the hospital. The crisis in medical education is existential, but often narrated…
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The Best Minds, Jonathan Rosen
Everyone knows someone with mental illness; few people have a friend who can know them from as many perspectives as Rosen knows Michael Laudor. They grew up together, attended college together, then set out on parallel paths. Laudor’s detoured into illness before ending in violence. The Atlantic excerpt left me in tears at the murder…
Abraham Nussbaum
Physician, Teacher, Writer
