10 Best Medical Books Depicting Stirring Contemporary Medical Drama
If you're toying with the idea of donning a white coat and spending your days in a hospital, pouring over cryptic medical charts, or if you simply fancy a riveting read set in the fast-paced world of medicine, this is the list for you. The best way to seek solace and feel connected to the medical world without facing its daunting challenges? Plunge yourself into the labyrinth of these captivating medical novels and comics. These picks intricately intertwine science and storytelling and offer a thrilling peek into the world of healthcare in vivid detail. These books are not just for those rooted in the medical field. Even if you barely scraped through high school biology, these narratives are accessible, profound, and will make you appreciate the complexities and miracles of medicine like never before. Encompassing genuine patient encounters, the realities of medical research, ethical challenges, and the inescapable humanness amongst all this science, these narratives will make your heart flutter and occasionally, gasp for air. So, buckle up, folks. You're about to embark on an intense journey through heart-rending dramas and triumphant victories, where the protagonists are dressed in scrubs and possess a scalpel for a wand. Get ready for the top 10 medical books that paint the most stirring contemporary medical dramas.
『The House of God』
An intern becomes disillusioned with the medical establishment when he sees his fellow interns fall for the illusions that destroy a doctor's ability to relate to and really care for his patients.
Author | Samuel Shem |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Berkley Publishing Group |
Release Date | Jan 01, 2010 |
Source | Google Books |
『Perfectly Undone』
“The most sensational, emotionally raw, and satisfying debut of the fall.” –Redbook Magazine “From family secrets to heartbreaking lost love, the characters felt like old friends by the end. Highly recommended.”—New York Times bestselling author Kate Moretti Sometimes you have to lose your way to find yourself… Dr. Dylan Michels has worked hard for a perfect life. When her longtime boyfriend gets down on one knee, it’s the most perfect moment of all…but Dylan says no. For too many years, Dylan’s been living for her late older sister, who never got the chance to grow up. Dylan thought being the perfect daughter, perfect partner and perfect doctor would eventually ease the haunting guilt she feels over her sister’s death—and the role no one knows she played in it. But still, years later, the grief is too much to bear. Now, Dylan must find the courage to face her past and define her own happiness if she truly wants to live the life her sister never could.
Author | Jamie Raintree |
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Price | $7.99 |
Publisher | Harlequin |
Release Date | Oct 03, 2017 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Queen of Hearts』
A powerful debut novel, praised by The New York Times, Bustle, and Hypable, that pulses with humor and empathy as it explores the heart's capacity for forgiveness.... Zadie Anson and Emma Colley have been best friends since their early twenties, when they first began navigating serious romantic relationships amid the intensity of medical school. Now they're happily married wives and mothers with successful careers--Zadie as a pediatric cardiologist and Emma as a trauma surgeon. Their lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, are chaotic but fulfilling, until the return of a former colleague unearths a secret one of them has been harboring for years. As chief resident, Nick Xenokostas was the center of Zadie's life--both professionally and personally--throughout a tragic chain of events during her third year of medical school that she has long since put behind her. Nick's unexpected reappearance at a time of new professional crisis shocks both women into a deeper look at the difficult choices they made at the beginning of their careers. As it becomes evident that Emma must have known more than she revealed about circumstances that nearly derailed both their lives, Zadie starts to question everything she thought she knew about her closest friend.
Author | Kimmery Martin |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Penguin |
Release Date | Feb 05, 2019 |
Source | Google Books |
『When Breath Becomes Air』
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question, What makes a life worth living? “Unmissable . . . Finishing this book and then forgetting about it is simply not an option.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, People, NPR, The Washington Post, Slate, Harper’s Bazaar, Time Out New York, Publishers Weekly, BookPage At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both. Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Books for a Better Life Award in Inspirational Memoir
Author | Paul Kalanithi |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Random House |
Release Date | Jan 12, 2016 |
Source | Google Books |
『Flight Season』
From the author of "Dream Things True" and "The Radius of Us" comes a story of two teenagers learning what to hold on to, what to let go of, and that sometimes love gets in the way of plans.
Author | Marie Marquardt |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Wednesday Books |
Release Date | Feb 20, 2018 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Pull of the Stars』
In Dublin, 1918, a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu is a small world of work, risk, death, and unlooked-for love, in "Donoghue's best novel since Room" (Kirkus Reviews). In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia's regimented world step two outsiders—Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a rumoured Rebel on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney. In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other's lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work. In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue once again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds.
Author | Emma Donoghue |
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Price | $11.99 |
Publisher | Little, Brown |
Release Date | Jul 21, 2020 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Heart』
One of Bill Gates' "Five Best Summer Reads" The basis for the critically-acclaimed film, Heal the Living, directed by Katell Quillévéré and starring Tahar Rahim and Emmanuelle Seigner Albertine Prize Finalist Winner of the Wellcome Book Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize Just before dawn on a Sunday morning, three teenage boys go surfing. While driving home exhausted, the boys are involved in a fatal car accident on a deserted road. Two of the boys are wearing seat belts; one goes through the windshield. The doctors declare him brain-dead shortly after arriving at the hospital, but his heart is still beating. The Heart takes place over the twenty-four hours surrounding the resulting heart transplant, as life is taken from a young man and given to a woman close to death. In gorgeous, ruminative prose, it examines the deepest feelings of everyone involved as they navigate decisions of life and death. As stylistically audacious as it is emotionally explosive, The Heart mesmerized readers in France, where it has been hailed as the breakthrough work of a new literary star. With the precision of a surgeon and the language of a poet, de Kerangal has made a major contribution to both medicine and literature with an epic tale of grief, hope, and survival.
Author | Maylis de Kerangal |
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Price | $11.99 |
Publisher | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Release Date | Feb 09, 2016 |
Source | Google Books |
『This Is Going to Hurt』
Now an AMC+ series starring Ben Whishaw The acclaimed multimillion-copy bestseller, This Is Going to Hurt is Adam Kay’s equally "blisteringly funny" (Boston Globe) and “heartbreaking” (New Yorker) secret diaries of his years as a young doctor. Welcome to 97-hour weeks. Welcome to life and death decisions. Welcome to a constant tsunami of bodily fluids. Welcome to earning less than the hospital parking meter. Wave goodbye to your friends and relationships. Welcome to the life of a first-year doctor. Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights, and missed weekends, comedian and former medical resident Adam Kay’s This Is Going to Hurt provides a no-holds-barred account of his time on the front lines of medicine. Hilarious, horrifying, and heartbreaking by turns, this is everything you wanted to know—and more than a few things you didn’t—about life on and off the hospital ward. And yes, it may leave a scar.
Author | Adam Kay |
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Price | $14.49 |
Publisher | HarperCollins |
Release Date | Mar 08, 2022 |
Source | Google Books |
『Oxygen』
With the compassion of Jodi Picoult and the medical realism of Atul Gawande, real-life anesthesiologist Carol Cassella’s riveting national bestseller seamlessly melds compelling women’s fiction and medical drama to create an “involving debut that’s just what the doctor ordered” (People). Dr. Marie Heaton is an anesthesiologist at the height of her profession. She has worked, lived, and breathed her career since medical school, and she now practices at a top Seattle hospital. Marie has carefully constructed and constricted her life according to empirical truths, to the science and art of medicine. But when her tried-and-true formula suddenly deserts her during a routine surgery, she must explain the nightmarish operating room disaster and face the resulting malpractice suit. Marie’s best friend, colleague, and former lover, Dr. Joe Hillary, becomes her closest confidante as she twists through depositions, accusations and a remorseful preoccupation with the mother of the patient in question. As she struggles to salvage her career and reputation, Marie must face hard truths about the path she’s chosen, the bridges she’s burned, and the colleagues and superiors she’s mistaken for friends. A quieter crisis is simultaneously unfolding within Marie’s family. Her aging father is losing his sight and approaching an awkward dependency on Marie and her sister, Lori. But Lori has taken a more traditional path than Marie and is busy raising a family. Although Marie has been estranged from her Texas roots for decades, the ultimate responsibility for their father’s care is falling on her. As her carefully structured life begins to collapse, Marie confronts questions of love and betrayal, family bonds and the price of her own choices. Set against the natural splendor of Seattle, and inside the closed vaults of hospital operating rooms, Oxygen climaxes in a final twist that is as heartrending as it is redeeming.
Author | Carol Cassella |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
Release Date | Jun 09, 2009 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Death Committee』
The New York Times–bestselling author delivers “a big, authentic novel” of the professional and personal challenges of three young doctors (The New York Times). Three young men from different backgrounds have graduated from medical schools and become surgical fellows at a leading teaching hospital in Boston. They learn to become surgeons, to communicate with patients and families, and to be observed and appraised by their peers and professors on daily rounds. And each month—sometimes with dry mouth and rapid pulse—each attends the meeting of the Mortality Conference, known to all as the Death Committee, which examines every patient loss for possible human error, in order to prevent it from happening again. How the Death Committee affects and is affected by the lives, loves, and ambitions of three new doctors is the theme of this intriguing and profoundly moving novel.
Author | Noah Gordon |
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Price | $19.99 |
Publisher | Open Road Media |
Release Date | Jun 05, 2012 |
Source | Google Books |
Wow! My heart raced, I laughed, I cried, I even felt a sudden urge to buy some scrubs and a stethoscope. The books on this list literally gave me a degree's worth of medical knowledge without stepping foot in a med school. Realistically, they come nowhere close to the experience of actual medical professionals, but boy, do they offer a riveting insight into their world. Full of extraordinary characters, who are passionate, flawed, and all-too-human, these books take you on a whirlwind journey through the highs and lows of modern medicine. Make no mistake, these are not leisurely strolls down medical lane. Be ready to watch your pulse spike or to hold back tears as you become entangled in the intricate web of ethical dilemmas, life-and-death decisions, and the stark reality of human fragility. But it's not all gloom and doom, there's plenty of endearment, humor, and uplifting moments that showcase the strength of the human spirit. So, put on your lab coats, grab a cup of strong coffee, and clear your schedule. You've got ten fantastic medical dramas to savour, and trust me, you're going to want to dissect every single chapter.
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