It’s as creaky as the cheap RV they set out in, but the last of the Bascombe novels was delightful deja vu. While reading its pages, I met, no fooling, a Mayo neurologist who specializes in movement disorders. She envinced none of the accumulated weights from her caregiving that Bascombe carts around the upper Midwest,…

Want to read about doctoring through political strife? After getting crosswise with Mussolini’s Fascists, Levi is sentenced to the south. He hopes to ride out the exile at his easel, but the local doctors are compromised by their affection for the profession. Levi remembers one local doctor warning him about the peasants: “Everyone tried to…

A model institutional history, for the most-storied safety-net hospital. It’s got plutocrats, politicians, and pathologists. Coming late to this book, it also feels like it was plundered for a series of medical drama productions. It’s that shovel-deep.

One of my fave thing about used books is finding signs of the previous reader. In this one, found a United bag tag receipt by a family medicine doctor. A quick Google search and I realized our paths had crossed. Where he did stop? Page 142: “I can’t talk with you now. I’m busy.” (Solid…

Working in a public hospital leaves you with questions about how and why the safety-net was stitched together. Why are mental illness and renal disease funded differently? Why are grandparents and grandchildren in such different buckets? Did someone actually intend this bureaucratic morass??? No single book answers those questions in a more straightforward manner than…

It’s a winter read, for sure, brimming with bark-stripping broadsides. Ehrenreich was the polemicist medicine deserved because she disliked cant and commerce, favouring science and socialism instead. She surely strips away some truths in the process, but it’s a bracing way to get past the built-up lies of today’s healthcare industry. I only wish she…

Minor works from the major doctor-writer. … And yet, gems like– “His reading suggested someone swimming in the sea surrounded by the wreckage of his ship, and trying to save his life by eagerly grasping first one spar and then another.” — capture the survival strategy of a doctor like me.

Chekov is the Ur-text for physician writers. “Only the rich peasants feared death. The richer they grew, the less they believed in God and and salvation, and if they gave candles and had special masses said, it was only for fear of their earthly end and to be on the safe side. Poorer peasants were…

On the third anniversary of the pandemic-which-shall-not-be-named, I finally read @emmabgo on six NYC med students who graduated early. It has all the vibes–PPE shortages, Face-Timed goodbyes, post-shift Silkwood showers– of the hero era of the pandemic. Grateful she got it all down on paper.

We see patients. We attend to the sick. Doctors like me do neither half as well as this Baker. It’s a book about following peregrines for seven months, but a witness to deep attention. “The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.” I wish I could see this well as a…