Books to read to become a better doctor

the last lecture.

They've already been mentioned, but I just finished cutting for stone and it was a really amazing book and should definitely be on the top of anybody's to read list. Also, when the air hits your brain is a personal favorite of mine, lots of great stories, funny, sad and a seemingly honest portrayal of what neurosurgery training was/is like. Still trying to get to a lot of the other ones mentioned here. I'd also say that I've read some of Gawande and Gladwell's books and I can see why they are friends, both have made a ton of money writing widely disseminated versions of other people's ideas.

I've been reading House of God for a while....anyone else find that the dialogue and pacing of the novel leaves a lot to be desired? I've gone through Atlas Shrugged at far faster pace than HoG.


Also:

Improving your Bedside Manner by Jacquelyn Small. Pretty good read so far.

Gifted Hands - not sure how much it'll tell you about the day to day life of medicine but Ben Carson is damn impressive

Vanguard23 said:

I've been reading House of God for a while....anyone else find that the dialogue and pacing of the novel leaves a lot to be desired? I've gone through Atlas Shrugged at far faster pace than HoG.

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Internship is a long and torturous year -- why should a book about it be any different... on the other hand, if you aren't laughing and recognizing the characters in the book as similar to some you have known, you don't have enough life experience to really enjoy the book as it is meant to be enjoyed. Put is aside and read it at the end of M3 year... too soon is a waste of time.

UPDATE

The LIST

• House of God
• The Art of War
• Everybody Poops
• Forgive and Remember by Charles Bosk
• The Making of a Surgeon by Dr. William Nolen
• Intern by Doctor X (Alan Nourse)
• Journey Round My Skull by Frigyes Karinthy
• Complications
• Clinical Pathophysiology Made Ridiculously Simple
• How Doctors Think, by Groopman
• The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness, by Groopman
• INTERNAL BLEEDING: The Truth Behind America's Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes, by Wachter and Shojania
• Walk on Water: The Miracle of Saving Children's Lives, by Ruhlman
• Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, by Gawande
• King of Hearts: The True Story of the Maverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery, by Miller
• The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
• Lost In America: A Journey with My Father
• Hot Lights, Cold Steel
• Blue Collar, Blue Scrubs
• Another Day In the Frontal Lobe
• Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality
• When the Air Hits Your Brain
• Eleven Blue Men
• America's Social Health by Marque-Luisa Miringgoff
• The Checklist Manifesto
• Body of Work - Meditations on Mortality from The Human Anatomy Lab
• Every Patient Tells a Story - Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis
• The Diagnosis of Acute Abdomen in Rhyme
• A Case of Need
• Walking out on the Boys by Francis Conley
• The Wisdom of the Body by Sherwin B. Nuland
• How We Die by Sherwin B. Nuland
• The Man who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks
• The Strange Case of The Walking Cadaver by Nancy Butcher
• Timeline by Michael Crichton
• The Intern Blues by Rober Marion
• Just Here Trying to Save a Few Lives
• The Scalpel and the SIlver Bear
• Health and Healing by Andrew Weil
• A Map of the Child by Darshak Sangavi
• Terminal by Robin Cook
• The Lost Art of Healing: Practicing Compassion in Medicine
• The Elegant Universe by Brain Greene
• Walk on Water: INside an Elite Pediatric Surgical Unit
• The Language of Cells: A Doctor and His Patients by Spencer Nadler
• Becoming a Doctor by melivin Konner
• The Ditchdigger's Daughters
• The Dressing Station by Jonathan Kaplan
• Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest for Dr. Paul Farmer
• Delivering Doctor Amelia: The Story of a Gifted Young Obstetrician's Mistake and the Psychologist who Helped Her
• Surviing the Extremes, A Doctor's Journey to the Limits of Human Endurance
• Travels and/or Five Patients by Michael Crichton
• Driving Mr. Albert by Michael Paterniti
• On Doctoring by Richard Reynolds
• The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
• The Ultimate Guide to Choosing a Medical Speciality by Brain Freeman
• Letters to a Young Doctor by Richard Selzer
• Pathologies of Power
• Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Remen
• Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom by Christiane Northrup
• Tuesdays With Morrie
• King of Hearts: The True Story of the Maverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery
• A Not Entirely Benign Procedure: Four Years as a Medical Student
• Young "what my Patients Taught Me"
• Forgive and Remember, Managing Medical Failure
• The Lassa Ward
• The Lazarus Case Life and Death Issues in Neonatal Intensive Care
• The Knife Man, The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter
• Not All of Us are Saints, A Doctor's Journey with the Poor
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
• A Way of Life by William Osler
• Classic Cases in Medical Ethics, Gregory Pence
• A PhD is Not Enough, Peter Feibelman
• Doctor Stories, Carlos Williams
• Who Shall Live?, Victor Fuchs
• My Own Country, Abraham Verghese
• Confessions of a Knife, Richard Selzer
• When the Air Hits Your Brain, Frank Vertosick
• The Hot Zone, Richard Preston
• Virus Hunter: Thirty Years of Battling
• Hot Viruses Around the World, CJ Peters
• The Demon Under the Microscope, Thomas Hager
• The Great Influenza, John Barry
• The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson
• The Coming Plague, Laurie Garret
• The Constant Gardener, John LeCarre
• Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
• Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
• My stroke of insight by Jill Bolt
• movie "Something the Lord Made"
• The Short Guide to a Happy Life (Anna Quindlen)
• Worried Sick by Nortin Hadle
• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
• Sick by Jonathan Cohn
• the last lecture
• Improving your Bedside Manner by Jacquelyn Small
• Gifted Hands by Ben Carson

LizzyM said:

Internship is a long and torturous year -- why should a book about it be any different... on the other hand, if you aren't laughing and recognizing the characters in the book as similar to some you have known, you don't have enough life experience to really enjoy the book as it is meant to be enjoyed. Put is aside and read it at the end of M3 year... too soon is a waste of time.

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You misunderstand. I enjoy the book. I just said I found the dialogue and pacing to be clunky. There's little segue between scenes and I can't picture some of the dialogue as taking place while in other novels I can, quite easily.

Something for the Pain by Paul Austin is a super good autobiography about an ER doc. I would definitely recommend it. I loved the author's brutal honesty!

And of course........... HARRY POTTER

starcraft ghost nova.

am i the only person in here who don't read novels or books for fun except if they are the involved in our favorite video games lol?

DrDrToBe said:

The Spirit Catches You is truly an excellent book. This was actually required reading during my first year of med school, and the doctors in the story were guest speakers for my class. It provides tremendous insight into patient care and cultural competency.

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That must have been quite interesting. I would have loved to have been there.

Strength in what remains ( by Tracy Kidder who also wrote mountains beyond mountains), this is an inspirational book about a man that escaped genocide in Rewanda and then went from homeless to a physician in the US before returning to help his village. True story which makes our problems seem like nothing in comparison.

It took 49 posts to get to Mountains Beyond Mountains. Really? I would say that's the number book "to read to become a better doctor."

I would recommend Pathologies of Power, written by Dr. Farmer himself.

Also, for people interested in addiction/homelessness Righteous Dopefiend by Philippe Bourgois is excellent. This is also one of the most engaging ethnographies I've read, though I enjoyed his book In Search of Respect more. That, however is about crack dealers in Harlem in the 1980s and early 1990's and may not be of great interest to pre-meds.

Twilight because the themes are universal.

health care meltdown by lebow was

Extreme Clinic -- An Outpatient Doctor's Guide to the Perfect 7 Minute Visit

The book recommends you put a clock BEHIND you which the patient can see, so that they have some idea as to how much time of your's they're wasting.

OH, you want to be a better doctor? Look elsewhere

Ok..in the past few months I have read:

Complications-Gawande
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks-Skloot
How Doctors Think-Groopman
Another Day in the Frontal Lope-Firlik

I am halfway through House of God and I have Hot Lights, Cold Steel next on the que.

I definitely recommend The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks!! It was so interesting and a good but fast read. Written by a journalist who interviewed many of the Lacks family, we get not only the story of how the HeLa cells transformed science but also how her family dealt with the aftermath.

Complications was great. He presents multiple just plain interesting subjects in the practice of medicine. Fun read. Interesting throughout.

How Doctors Think. This one read more like a textbook. It's a good comparision to Complications--similar content but incredibly different writing style. It wasn't fun and I got the point he was making early on. Then he continued making it.

Frontal Lobe. Not bad, but I didn't agree with some of the Dr.'s opinions and it felt a little preachy at times. Also, I was disappointed that I bought a book about a neurosurgeon only to find out that she never really practiced. After residency she did consulting I believe.

House of God is something else. It's written exactly like from the mind of the intern to the page. Random thoughts, fantasies, first impressions, just written down in this book. My first LOL moment was when his patient was having an MI: "Wonderful. Call a Doctor. Wait-you are a doctor." There's also a lot of dirty sex going on. Even made me a little at first.

Happy reading!!!

MCAT guy said:

Just started reading this, 'tis good.

The Emperor of All Maladies

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Yeah, I read a review of this book recently.

Apparently the author started writing it to get away from the intensity of oncology and to find a hobby that would help him survive the training.

Writing a book about cancer seems like a funny escape though.

Do you like the book so far?

My Hitch in Hell: The Bataan Death March by Lester I. Tenney

This is not a med book, but if you ever think life is thumping you on the head, read this book. I haven't done residency yet, but I'm guessing it is a cake walk compared to this guy's story.

I need to get my hands on "The Emperor of All Maladies." I've heard very good things about it and since I'm immersed in cancer research and am interested in pursuing radonc, I reeeeeeeally want to read this book!

I think I'll ask my family to get this for me for Christmas or something!

Also, "Walk on Water" (which is already on the list) is one of my favorite medical-related books! It's very well written and you can't help but be at awe at the work pediatric cardiothoracic surgeons do.

Intern: A Doctor's Initiation by Sandeep Jauhar

I finished this book a little while ago. It is an eye opening read.

One of my favorites is "Just Here Trying to Save a Few Lives" by Pamela Grim, M.D.

It's about her time with Doctors Without Borders, so if you're interested in global health it might interest you. Also interesting as she compares it to her residency in Chicago (?) and highlights some insane health disparities.

when I was younger, I read a lot of Lurlene McDaniel books they're a bit of fluff for those rainy days but I think they're a good read anyway...
I'd also recommend Tuesdays With Morrie and A Lesson Before Dying

darkly dreaming dexter, dearly devoted dexter, dexter in the dark, etc...

LizzyM said:

UPDATE

The LIST

• House of God
• The Art of War
• Everybody Poops
• Forgive and Remember by Charles Bosk
• The Making of a Surgeon by Dr. William Nolen
• Intern by Doctor X (Alan Nourse)
• Journey Round My Skull by Frigyes Karinthy
• Complications
• Clinical Pathophysiology Made Ridiculously Simple
• How Doctors Think, by Groopman
• The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness, by Groopman
• INTERNAL BLEEDING: The Truth Behind America's Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes, by Wachter and Shojania
• Walk on Water: The Miracle of Saving Children's Lives, by Ruhlman
• Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, by Gawande
• King of Hearts: The True Story of the Maverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery, by Miller
• The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
• Lost In America: A Journey with My Father
• Hot Lights, Cold Steel
• Blue Collar, Blue Scrubs
• Another Day In the Frontal Lobe
• Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality
• When the Air Hits Your Brain
• Eleven Blue Men
• America's Social Health by Marque-Luisa Miringgoff
• The Checklist Manifesto
• Body of Work - Meditations on Mortality from The Human Anatomy Lab
• Every Patient Tells a Story - Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis
• The Diagnosis of Acute Abdomen in Rhyme
• A Case of Need
• Walking out on the Boys by Francis Conley
• The Wisdom of the Body by Sherwin B. Nuland
• How We Die by Sherwin B. Nuland
• The Man who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks
• The Strange Case of The Walking Cadaver by Nancy Butcher
• Timeline by Michael Crichton
• The Intern Blues by Rober Marion
• Just Here Trying to Save a Few Lives
• The Scalpel and the SIlver Bear
• Health and Healing by Andrew Weil
• A Map of the Child by Darshak Sangavi
• Terminal by Robin Cook
• The Lost Art of Healing: Practicing Compassion in Medicine
• The Elegant Universe by Brain Greene
• Walk on Water: INside an Elite Pediatric Surgical Unit
• The Language of Cells: A Doctor and His Patients by Spencer Nadler
• Becoming a Doctor by melivin Konner
• The Ditchdigger's Daughters
• The Dressing Station by Jonathan Kaplan
• Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest for Dr. Paul Farmer
• Delivering Doctor Amelia: The Story of a Gifted Young Obstetrician's Mistake and the Psychologist who Helped Her
• Surviing the Extremes, A Doctor's Journey to the Limits of Human Endurance
• Travels and/or Five Patients by Michael Crichton
• Driving Mr. Albert by Michael Paterniti
• On Doctoring by Richard Reynolds
• The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
• The Ultimate Guide to Choosing a Medical Speciality by Brain Freeman
• Letters to a Young Doctor by Richard Selzer
• Pathologies of Power
• Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Remen
• Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom by Christiane Northrup
• Tuesdays With Morrie
• King of Hearts: The True Story of the Maverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery
• A Not Entirely Benign Procedure: Four Years as a Medical Student
• Young "what my Patients Taught Me"
• Forgive and Remember, Managing Medical Failure
• The Lassa Ward
• The Lazarus Case Life and Death Issues in Neonatal Intensive Care
• The Knife Man, The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter
• Not All of Us are Saints, A Doctor's Journey with the Poor
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
• A Way of Life by William Osler
• Classic Cases in Medical Ethics, Gregory Pence
• A PhD is Not Enough, Peter Feibelman
• Doctor Stories, Carlos Williams
• Who Shall Live?, Victor Fuchs
• My Own Country, Abraham Verghese
• Confessions of a Knife, Richard Selzer
• When the Air Hits Your Brain, Frank Vertosick
• The Hot Zone, Richard Preston
• Virus Hunter: Thirty Years of Battling
• Hot Viruses Around the World, CJ Peters
• The Demon Under the Microscope, Thomas Hager
• The Great Influenza, John Barry
• The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson
• The Coming Plague, Laurie Garret
• The Constant Gardener, John LeCarre
• Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
• Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
• My stroke of insight by Jill Bolt
• movie "Something the Lord Made"
• The Short Guide to a Happy Life (Anna Quindlen)
• Worried Sick by Nortin Hadle
• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
• Sick by Jonathan Cohn
• the last lecture
• Improving your Bedside Manner by Jacquelyn Small
• Gifted Hands by Ben Carson
• Biggest Pathology book by Robbins

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Updated

I am inspired by anything Atul Gawande writes - I just finished "Better" yesterday.
He also does excellent pieces in the New Yorker. I think everyone should read "Letting Go", which can be found here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gawande

And of course Jerome Groopman, as others have mentioned ("How Doctors Think" and "The Anatomy of Hope").

There's a book titled "Becoming a Better Doctor" by Dr. Al Notre. This book will change your life...I just finished the whole thing in like 3 hours.

"Kill as Few Patients as Possible: And 56 Other Essays on How to Be the World's Best Doctor" by Oscar London

Easy to read (each essay is only a page or two) and ridiculously funny. Or maybe just ridiculous.

megrs said:

"Kill as Few Patients as Possible: And 56 Other Essays on How to Be the World's Best Doctor" by Oscar London

Easy to read (each essay is only a page or two) and ridiculously funny. Or maybe just ridiculous.

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Even more ridiculous (and funny) is From Voodoo to Viagra, also from Oscar London. The Amazon preview has the first essay, which is a hysterical parody of "Eyes Wide Shut".

Dianyla said:

Even more ridiculous (and funny) is From Voodoo to Viagra, also from Oscar London. The Amazon preview has the first essay, which is a hysterical parody of "Eyes Wide Shut".

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"To this medical viewer, the differential diagnosis was heroin overdose versus near-terminal boredom from having spent the better part of an evening submitting to Sidney Pollack."

I love it already.

Because of this thread, I recently read both 'Final Exam' and 'Complications.' I want to write down my thoughts about these books so that I won't forget them later on and also to share them with the internet.

Essentially, both books seem to have similar structures. Each book is a set of clinical stories that have been selected to reinforce the authors' points. These stories are also supposed to be organized in a logical manner, but at times this seems very arbitrary.

For example, Gawande's final case of the 'Swollen Leg' could have just as easily been filed under the Mystery of medicine as under the Uncertainty. What are the mysterious forces that determine which bacteria infect people? How can this be controlled?

Overall, the language in both books is very down to earth and (fortunately) not flowery. No attempt is made to exaggerate and impress the readers with large vocabularies and complex sentence structure. Each clinical story is described quite concisely.


However, these books also differ:

Final Exam
Rating: "interesting and passable, but not very good" (3.5/5)

The main complaint with this book is that many examples seem pointless, and don't really teach me anything.

Consider the example of how anatomy is taught to medical students. The author describes this experience at some length. The reader learns that some people drop out of med school in first year (surprise?), that seeing a corpse is traumatizing, and that memorizing many muscles is difficult.

But, no deeper lesson really seems to be there. The story is interesting, but I was left asking: 'so what?'

Two of the main ideas from the book were very interesting. One of them is that physicians become desensitized to death, and that they begin thinking of themselves as immortal. This was insightful for me -- I had always heard about this, but never read a personal account of this happening to someone.

The shock that Pauline received when cutting up a young Asian female was really fascinating. As gentle and sentimental as she is, she too had become desensitized. It's almost as if doctors need to see a reflection of themselves dead before they admit that they will eventually pass on.

The second main idea that I enjoyed thinking and reading about is that death is ignored by most physicians. Her examples illustrate this point well. The proof for this includes doctors avoiding telling patients of their upcoming deaths, doctors running away from the ICU when a patient is about to die, and Pauline herself ignoring her friend while she was dying.

Overall, I really wanted to like this book because I too am sentimental and sometimes think about questions such as the ones she raised. However, the lack of meaning in several examples and the overall disjointed feeling of the book took away from this. The read was passable, but hardly "good".

Also, the mood of the whole book seems quite negative. Clearly, the subject matter is death, but this doesn't mean that there can't be more positive and encouraging examples. It was almost as if the author had some things to get off her chest, so she just dumped them all in this book.

Complications
Rating: "quite good" (4/5)

Unlike in 'Final Exam', most of the clinical stories in 'Complications' seemed to hold specific and interesting lessons.

Let's consider one example -- the young author learning to insert a central line. Aside from having lots of clinical detail (I could almost see myself uncertainly and shyly stabbing the patient with a needle), this anecdote reveals something deeper.

In my mind, medicine is largely evidence based. I know that diagnoses aren't always clearcut, but most of medicine still seems solidly grounded in science.

However, this example shows very well how much art and simple trial and error can be involved. Gawande never received concrete and foolproof instructions for how to insert a central line. There is no step by step protocol for hitting a vein. Despite all the knowledge of anatomy and surgical procedures, he simply had to 'jab the needle in' and hope for the best. When he asked several of his colleagues, they seemed to give different advice, and yet no one could come up with precise instructions.

At the end of the day, he simply had to practice a couple of times and learn to get the feel for the procedure. To me, this was a really good example of the art and subjectivity involved in medicine. Overall, reading this made me learn more about how medicine is actually practiced. I was able to reconsider my previous belief about just what percentage of clinical decisions are based on evidence and what percent is based on art and intuition.

Overall, the tone of Gawande's book is also a lot more optimistic than that of 'Final Exam'. All the way from the story about the young child unable to breathe to the final story of the swollen leg, the reader is persuaded to think that things will "turn out all right." And even if the doctors don't know, they will guess correctly. Come to think of it, maybe Gawande has been too selective with his examples. I am sure that he has seen his share of errors and bad luck.

-Anything written by Atul Gawande (including articles)
-Intern by Sandeep Juahar (sp?)
-Survival of the Sickest by Sharon Moalem (parts of it anyways)
-A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor by John Berger (dense, but if you can get through it theres a good message there)

Cheating Death by Sanjay Gupta isn't a bad read either

I am a fan of Solzhenitsyn (In the First Circle and The Gulag in particular) and Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment), as well as anything by Steinbeck, Verne, and James Baldwin, though I enjoy more poetry and more academic writings in philosophy (Kant and Mill), the social sciences, and physics/mathematics... I would say that In the First Circle, Roots, and The Grapes of Wrath have had the greatest impact on my life and my understanding of serving the underserved in medicine over the years...

4 / 5

Pros:

• Solidly written book that gives a window into the everyday work of an ER doctor
  • e.g., the author describes both positive and negative outcomes. The negative outcomes include the death of a young man after the author failed to diagnose cardiomyopathy and the author sending home a patient with badly broken vertebrae that protruded into the spinal cord and presented a serious risk.
  • The office politics of the job are revealed. Consultants will often not want to come to the ER and "waste their time." If they get called in for a wrong reason they can become less likely to come in the future. So, a large part of the job becomes finding a balance between calling for consults too often (and gaining a negative reputation) and calling for them too rarely (and having the patients suffer). This is far from the "ideal" world where every person with suspicious symptoms would see the appropriate specialist.
• The author doesn't get distracted by talking about his personal life (this is a positive thing for me since I want to learn about the clinical part of the job more than about any "stress at home" or "love affairs with the staff" or the color of his firstborn son's eyes)

Cons:

• The author does pat himself on the back a bit too much at times (paraphrasing: "I can readily admit when I am wrong, unlike some of the other doctors"). Other gems include: "Neurology, I now know, would have been a dead-end choice for me. Oh, I could have and would have done it well." Full of yourself, much? These slips made me wonder how honest and unbiased he was with the other material presented in the book.
• The plot seems to lose focus at times. For example, a chapter entitled "Something bad will happen every few years" contains a story about a man with a very strong pain in his testicles. The author is not sure if the pain is caused by twisted testicles (a very serious condition requiring rapid treatment), epididymitis (a condition requiring much less urgent treatment), or something else altogether (like cancer). The author goes off on several tangents and, frankly, by the end of the chapter I wasn't even sure how this story had ended.

Overall, the book was pretty decent. I recommend it to others (unless they are looking for a different type of read).

Add

What I learned in medical school--collection of short essays
Becoming a Doctor by Melvin Konner

the 48 laws of power ~ Robert Greene
The Art of Seduction ~ Robert Greene

most pre-meds i know are pretty *ahempussyahem* to be honest

also why dont you just edit the first post with the list rather than post the list in latter post, more people will see it

How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman is great.

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I've never been able to take Groopman seriously after my school had us read "Second Opinions," which may have been the first time my small group ever unanimously agreed on anything. That book was puppy-killing-awful! Thankfully the school agreed with us and it was dropped after just a year. "Jerome Groopman discusses how much Jerome Groopman loves Jerome Groopman" may have been a more appropriate title.

...as for "the spirit catches you." I just don't know what Fadiman's point was. It was a tragic story, but I thought the cultural history of the Hmong chapters were a lot better written than any of the chapters on the medical events.

/read non-medically related texts. keep your sanity. remind yourself that you're human.

The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care. By T. R. Reid.

Also, really agree with everyone who mentioned "The Spirit Catches You" and Atul Gawande's books.

I would disagree with people who have mentioned "Stiff." Really dumb, uninspired book just meant to entertain those who think dead bodies are cool/gross/interesting. (Disclaimer: I'm only half way through).

Edit: another book: Millions Saved: Proven Successes In Global Health by Ruth Levine. A good introduction into global health. Short but eye-opening. Not all health interventions are expensive and/or complex.

Read this book. Then read it again. Then read it a third time to really get all of the messages and themes in this classic.

Deadly Spin by Wendell Potter. It talks about how insurance companies use Public Relations (PR) to mislead the public in the healthcare reform situation.

Robins and Cotran "The Pathologic Basis of Disease" is a real page-turner.
Goodman and Gilmans "Manual of Pharmacology and Therapeutics"
Merck Manual 18th Edition

Those will help you become a 2nd year medical student. Start memorizing now or you will be behind.

Mushashi - Book of 5 Rings
Martin Buber - I and Thou
Kierkegaard - The Sickness Unto Death
Castiglione - the Book of the Courtier

if you want to become an anatomy and physiology expert, read:



(pics included for the visual learner)

mbeas said:

if you want to become an anatomy and physiology expert, read:

(pics included for the visual learner)

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+9001