Just for med ed nerds…. On a personal level, Barr helped me understand why I struggled in the first two years of med school: plentiful data showed that humanities majors struggled in the preclinical years only to do well in the clinical years. On a societal level, this book frustrated me: despite data showing that…

Kleinman became more fully human. Not by decades of doctoring, but by caring for his ailing wife. Why do even our most esteemed physicians report that they do not become true caregivers in our daily work? “Caregiving teaches one humility; you learn that no matter how able and successful you may be in some realms–…

Weary from social justice debates? Basil offers a more radical account. It’s not two-tiered, it’s all in for the eschaton. To The Rich! I Will Tear Down My Barns! In Time of Famine and Drought! Against Those Who Lend At Interest! And for all the poor.

Cocaine shaped the two structures– psychoanalysis and residency– that defined my medical training. In Markel’s telling, Freud shifts from description to interpretation, and Halsted transforms from an ever-present surgeon to an aloof attending under the influence of cocaine. A fascinating account of how substance use shapes our lives. More than a century on, I recognized…

If you care about progressive movements within medicine, you have to know how we failed to build an actual healthcare system. Challenging Starr’s seminal work, Swenson places the blame squarely on the American Medical Association. I knew some of this, disagreed with the microscopic focus on the AMA, and learned even more. Just a devastating…

Why pandemic? @VTadjo offers a humane, poetic view of the 2014 Ebola pandemic that feels more timely and more incisive than most COVID post-mortems. Sweeping but intimate, Tadjo hears the tree, the bat, the scientist, and the sufferer all speak. We do too. Here’s a doctor “in a spacesuit discovering a new universe”: “I refuse…

What happens when you neglect public health for decades? A Lewis book can feel like a ready-made– assemble a scrappy band of profane characters who see things to which their sclerotic masters are blind and then wind them up into an I told you so— but damn if it don’t read well. More than most,…

“I shall do nothing to discourage my patient, Monseigneur, any more than I shall bleed him, as many good people urge me to do. The mind, too, has a kind of blood: in common speech we call it hope.” I adored all this novel of frontier Kebec, and its descriptions of medicine, but this line…

Damn @praddenkeefe, this was one was devastating. Hippocrates said doctors harvest misfortunes of their own to rid the sick of their disease and suffering. The Sacklers inverted the formula, harvesting a fortune off patient’s misfortunes. A deeply-reported account of how the Sackler family fed the opioid epidemic, it can also be read as a story…

Greene’s remarkable account of suicide as the satisfaction theory of atonement describes Dr. Travis as earnest and reverent as a priest. “…he treated the body with great respect; when he rapped the chest he did it slowly, carefully, with his ear bowed close as though he really expected somebody or something to rap back.” Scobie,…