Best medical biographies
The Medicine Memoirs That Every Aspiring Doctor Should Read
My cousin Rob Meyer and I have known each other all our lives. A shared history and love of baseball are what have kept us close. While studying to become an emergency room doctor, Rob was mentored by my late father, while I went on a different path, becoming a writer. Writing was something I never knew my father aspired to until, after he died, I found notebooks full of poetry hidden amidst his medical textbooks and financial records.
As a nonfiction writer, my choice of subject has always been the unusual, the off-center: I wrote a book about bananas and another about birds and bird watching. I’ve written about a man who ran around the world, partially duplicating his feat by running halfway across Australia myself. I wrote about a friend who vanished, leaving a wife and child behind, only to resurface with an entirely new identity as a legendary hiker on the Appalachian Trail. My obsessions often occupy the strange corners, not center stage.
Rob had never thought he’d write a book. Although, after more than two decades as a doctor in one of the country’s busiest emergency rooms, the idea has been suggested to him several times. But one other thing we share is a love of reading medical memoirs, procedurals, and other nonfiction stories of triumph and tragedy in hospitals, operating rooms, and research facilities. We were both astonished by When Breath Becomes Air, neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi’s moving story of his own death by metastatic cancer. Rob teaches young doctors-in-training at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and he often assigns Atul Gawande’s brilliant Being Mortal, perhaps the greatest modern meditation on life and death from a physician’s perspective. I can attest that Gawande’s book isn’t just for doctors. But when COVID hit, Rob felt he needed to vent, to talk about his experience, to document it. And he turned to me to help
NeurologyResidents
By: Norman Doidge (Psychiatrist at University of Toronto)
About: Stories about neuroplasticity
Goodreads: An astonishing new science called neuroplasticity is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the human brain is immutable. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Norman Doidge, M.D., traveled the country to meet both the brilliant scientists championing neuroplasticity and the people whose lives they've transformed people whose mental limitations or brain damage were seen as unalterable. We see a woman born with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole, blind people who learn to see, learning disorders cured, IQs raised, aging brains rejuvenated, stroke patients learning to speak, children with cerebral palsy learning to move with more grace, depression and anxiety disorders successfully treated, and lifelong character traits changed. Using these marvelous stories to probe mysteries of the body, emotion, love, sex, culture, and education, Dr. Doidge has written an immensely moving, inspiring book that will permanently alter the way we look at our brains, human nature, and human potential.
20 Essential Biographies for Medical Students
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot:
Medical science would have ended up in severe stagnation were it not for the discovery of HeLa cells — an immortal cervical cancer sample responsible for polio vaccines, gene mapping, AIDS and cancer research and plenty more staggering advances. But until recently, nobody knew the often life story of Henrietta Lacks, the woman from whom the culture was originally (and unknowingly) taken.
Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox:
As with most women in the biological and medical fields prior to the mid-to-late 20th century, Rosalind Franklin witnessed many of her discoveries and theories appropriated by male colleagues — who, in turn, received all accompanying accolades without giving her any credit. Her research proved crucial in discovering DNA's double helix structure, but James Watson and Francis Crick won the Nobel Prize while she ended up floundering in obscurity.
My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Tyler:
Rather than a debilitating tragedy, neuroscientist Jill Bolte Tyler considered her stroke the perfect opportunity to research exactly how the brain works (and even repairs itself!) under such traumatic circumstances. This incredible memoir chronicles her bizarre, beautiful and beneficial experience transforming terrible physical and emotional pain into an influential learning experience.
Gifted Hands by Ben Carson and Cecil Murphey:
This inspiring autobiography takes readers from Detroit's inner-city neighborhoods to Johns Hopkins Hospital, tracing the life of an incredibly innovative surgeon and Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery. Ben Carson pioneered the hemispherectomy and a technique for safely separating conjoined twins, amongst plenty of other staggering and impressive accomplishments.
In the Land of Invisible Women by Qanta Ahmed:
For Qanta Ahmed, her overwhelming des
Speaker Biographies
Russ Biagio Altman, M.D., Ph.D.
Russ Biagio Altman, M.D., Ph.D., is a professor of bioengineering, genetics, and medicine (and of computer science, by courtesy) and past chair of the Bioengineering Department at Stanford University. His primary research interests are in the application of computing and informatics technologies to problems relevant to medicine. He is particularly interested in methods for understanding drug action at molecular, cellular, organism, and population levels. His laboratory studies how human genetic variation affects drug response. Other work focuses on the analysis of biological molecules to understand the action, interaction, and adverse events of drugs. Dr. Altman holds an A.B. from Harvard College, an M.D. from Stanford Medical School, and a Ph.D. in medical information sciences from Stanford. He has received the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians (ACP), the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. He is a past president, founding board member, and fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), and a past president of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics (ASCPT). Dr. Altman has chaired the Science Board advising the FDA Commissioner, and he currently serves on the NIH Advisory Committee to the Director. He is an organizer of the annual Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing and a founder of Personalis, Inc. Dr. Altman is board certified in internal medicine and clinical informatics. He received the Stanford Medical School graduate teaching award in 2000 and its mentorship award in 2014.