Have to acknowledge that many of these have come from a list generated by Rachel Kowalsky tweeting out for recommendations https://twitter.com/rachel_kowalsky/status/1596636362106884096
Rachel Kowalsky
YOUR FIRST PEDIATRIC INTUBATION
https://www.theintima.org/your-first-pediatric-intubation-rachel-kowalsky
First, eat a meal. Then kick your dragons to the curb. The dragons of your self-doubt, my dear! You rode them all the way here. Have you read the chapter? That will help. Let’s go.
1.Dress
in a plastic gown. Gather your endotracheal tube, laryngoscope, suction, stylet, syringe, pink tape. Connect the child to the monitor, the IV to its tubing, face mask to blue bag. Ask for medications early, and dose with care. Never do math in your head.
Joanna Connon
Joanna Cannon’s book ‘Breaking and Mending’ recounts vivid stories from her time as a junior doctor. In this extract, impressive teamwork in A&E restarts a woman’s heart, but the author comes to realise there are many, less dramatic, ways to save lives.
https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/XWeSyxAAACMAxzjS
There are many reasons why people decide to go to medical school, but if you had asked each of us on that first day why we were there, we would have told you it was because we wanted to make a difference. We would have told you it was because we wanted to do something valuable – something important. We would have told you it was because we wanted to save lives.
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Louise Aronson
A History of the Present Illness
In 16 elegant and original linked stories, A History of the Present Illness takes readers into the lives of doctors, patients and families. Powerful and original, the book offers a deeply humane, striking voice and an incisive portrait of health and illness in America today. Lauded by Kirkus Review as “a promising debut” of a new literary voice, the book tells stories readers haven’t read before.
A History of the Present Illness
Articles
https://www.kevinmd.com/2013/05/physicians-write-2.html
https://hms.harvard.edu/magazine/lgbtq-health/act-three
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Anna DeForest
‘s ‘A History of Present Illness’ + ‘OUR LONG MARVELOUS DYING’
“A History of Present Illness is a singular read, full of beauty and wit and monstrous truth. It took me down dark corridors of loss and out into the too bright sunshine again. I’ve never read anything like it. Wholly original and shockingly brilliant.”
— JENNY OFFILL, author of Weather
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Suzanne Koven
“The numerous self-serving anecdotes are unnecessary. It’s at times preachy and idealistic. This book disappoints if you’re truly looking for self help.”
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Perri Klass
https://www.perriklass.com/books
Victoria Sweet
https://www.victoriasweet.com/books/gods-hotel/
San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital was the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu (God’s Hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves — “anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times” and needed extended medical care — ended up there. Dr. Sweet ended up there herself, as a physician. And though she came for only a two-month stay, she remained for twenty years.
At Laguna Honda, lower-tech but human-paced, Dr. Sweet had the chance to practice a kind of “slow medicine” that has almost vanished. Gradually, the place and its patients transformed the way she understood the body. Alongside the modern view of the body as a machine to be fixed, her patients evoked an older notion, of the body as a garden to be tended. God’s Hoteltells their stories, and the story of the hospital, which — as efficiency experts, politicians, and architects descended, determined to turn it into a modern “health care facility” — revealed its truths about the cost and value of caring for body and soul.
In God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine Dr. Sweet lays out her evidence—in stories of her patients and her hospital—for some new ideas about medicine and healthcare in this country. In trying to get control of healthcare costs by emphasizing “efficiency,” we’ve headed down a wrong path. Medicine works best—that is, arrives at the right diagnosis and the right treatment for the least cost—when the doctor has enough time to do a good job, and pays attention not only to the patient but to what’s around the patient. Dr. Sweet calls this approach Slow Medicine, and she believes that, put into wider practice, it would be not only more satisfying for patient and doctor, but also less expensive. The New York Times calls her ideas “hard-core subversion”; Vanity Fair judges the book to be a “radical and compassionate alternative to modern healthcare,” and Health Affairs describes Dr. Sweet as a “visionary.”
Michelle Johnston
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Judy Melinek
‘Working Stiff’
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Karen Hitchcock
The Medicine
What happens when a doctor kills a patient? Are GPs overprescribing antidepressants? Does ‘female Viagra’ work? What role can psychedelics and cannabis play in treating pain? What is sickness, and how much of it is in our heads?
In The Medicine, Dr Karen Hitchcock takes us to the frontlines of everyday treatment, turning her acute gaze to everything from the flu season to dementia, plastic surgery to the humble sick day. In an overcrowded, underfunded medical system, she explores how more of us can be healthier, and how listening carefully to a patient’s experience can be as important as prescribing a pill. These dazzling essays show Hitchcock to be one of the most fearless and illuminating medical thinkers of our time – reasonable, insightful and deeply humane.
https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/medicine
https://www.themonthly.com.au/author/karen-hitchcock
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Lydia Kang
Susan White
‘Cut’
Carla is a young doctor striving to become the first female surgeon at a prestigious Melbourne hospital. When a consultant post opens up, she competes with her lover for the job and thinks she can be judged on merit. But an assault after a boozy workplace dinner leaves her traumatised and struggling to cope with the misogyny coming from every corner of her workplace. Recovering her fragmented memories from that night, Carla begins a fight for justice that will shake the foundations of the hospital she loves.
https://affirmpress.com.au/publishing/cut/?portfolioCats=15
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Sumaya Dave
https://www.saumyadave.com/other-writing
https://www.thefeministwire.com/2013/02/two-poems/
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Carol Cassella
‘Healer’
A Seattle physician has to reevaluate life and career when her husband’s business crashes. Through this tale of love and medical wonder, Cassella uses her 25 years of experience in the medical industry to inform a work of emotional distinction and penetrating insight.
https://carolcassella.com/healer/summary
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 constructed her professional 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.
https://carolcassella.com/oxygen/summary
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Lucia Gannon
All in a Doctor’s Day: Memoirs of an Irish Country Practice by Dr Lucia Gannon, published by Gill Books
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Rachel Clarke
How does it feel to confront a pandemic from the inside, one patient at a time? To bridge the gulf between a perilously unwell patient in quarantine and their distraught family outside? To be uncertain whether the protective equipment you wear fits the science or the size of the government stockpile? To strive your utmost to maintain your humanity even while barricaded behind visors and masks?
Rachel is a palliative care doctor who looked after the most gravely unwell patients on the Covid-19 wards of her hospital. Amid the tensions, fatigue and rising death toll, she witnessed the courage of patients and NHS staff alike in conditions of unprecedented adversity. For all the bleakness and fear, she found that moments that could stop you in your tracks abounded. People who rose to their best, upon facing the worst, as a microbe laid waste to the population.
Her new book, Breathtaking, is an unflinching insider’s account of medicine in the time of coronavirus. Drawing on testimony from nursing, acute and intensive care colleagues – as well as, crucially, her patients – Clarke argue that this age of contagion has inspired a profound attentiveness to – and gratitude for – what matters most in life.
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Heather Frimmer
Heather Frimmer is a radiologist specializing in breast and emergency room imaging. Her first novel, Bedside Manners, was published in 2018 and has received several awards including National Indie Excellence, Readers’ Favorite and Independent Press awards. She completed her medical training at Weill-Cornell Medical College, New York Presbyterian-Cornell and Yale New Haven Hospital. She lives with her husband and two children in suburban, Connecticut. Her second novel, Better to Trust, releases in September 2021.
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