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Biography and Autobiography E Books
The Song of Our Scars by Haider Warraich
A doctor's personal and unsparing account of how modern medicine's failure to understand pain has made care less effective In The Song of Our Scars, physician Haider Warraich offers a bold reexamination of the nature of pain, not as a simple physical sensation, but as a cultural experience. Warraich, himself a sufferer of chronic pain, considers the ways our notions of pain have been shaped not just by science but by politics and power, by whose suffering mattered and whose didn't. He weaves a provocative history from the Renaissance, when pain transformed into a medical issue, through the racial legacy of pain tolerance, to the opiate epidemics of both the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, to the cutting edge of present-day pain science. The conclusion is clear: only by reckoning with both pain's complicated history and its biology can today's doctors adequately treat their patients' suffering. Trenchant and deeply felt, The Song of Our Scars is an indictment of a broken system and a plea for a more holistic understanding of the human body.
ISBN: 9781541675308
Publication Date: 2022
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
"For readers of Atul Gawande, Andrew Solomon, and Anne Lamott, a profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir by a young neurosurgeon faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis who attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? 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.
ISBN: 9780812988406
Publication Date: 2016
Charles-Edouard Brown-Séquard by Louis-Cyril Celestin
Genius and dilettantism often go hand in hand. Nowhere is this truer than in the life of Charles-Edouard Brown-Séquard, the bilingual physician and neurologist who succeeded Claude Bernard as the Chair of Experimental Medicine at the College de France in Paris after having practiced in Paris, London and in the USA, especially in Harvard. For most men, making one discovery of global importance would have sufficed to satisfy their curiosity and self-image. Not so Brown-Séquard. His explanation of the neurological disparity following the hemi-section of the spinal cord was a unique achievement that added his name to the syndrome and made him immortal. Yet, the demons of his mind tormented him in his endless search for medical truths and drove him to explore other phenomena, seeking to explain and remedy them. This unique biography shows for the first time the conflict between his professional and personal life, and should appeal to all students of medical history and psychology.
ISBN: 9783319030203
Publication Date: 2013
Imagining the elephant a biography of Allan MacLeod Cormack by Vaughan, Christopher L
Imagining the Elephant is a biography of Allan MacLeod Cormack, a physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1979 for his pioneering contributions to the development of the computer-assisted tomography (CAT) scanner, an honor he shared with Godfrey Hounsfield. A modest genius who was also a dedicated family man, the book is a celebration of Cormack's life and work. It begins with his ancestral roots in the far north of Scotland, and then chronicles his birth and early years in South Africa, his education at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Cambridge University, and his subs
ISBN: 9786611869519
Publication Date: 2008
In Sight: My Life in Science and Health Innovation by Julia Levy
In Sightis a memoir about how a love of science and discovery drove Julia Levy, a celebrated scholar and biotech CEO, to work her way through gender bias in order to achieve academic and professional recognition. Her story traces the unconventional invention of a breakthrough drug treatment from its development from laboratory research to its application as a medical treatment for vision loss. Told from a female perspective,In Sight is a unique and personal story covering Levy's early years as a refugee, her university training in the UK, and her appointment as professor at the University of British Columbia. Years spent as an academic led the author to unexpected exposure to the biotechnology industry and a chance meeting with colleagues that led to the formation of a lucrative biotechnology company, known today as QLT Inc. The bulk of the book covers the years spent building the company, and Levy's surprising transition from chief scientific officer to CEO. In Sightis an honest description of the trials of drug development, the tensions inherent in the commercialization of health innovations, and the truly remarkable hurdles faced by women in the scientific community.
ISBN: 9781487508319
Publication Date: 2020
The Disabled Child by Amanda Apgar
When children are born with disabilities or become disabled in childhood, parents often experience bewilderment: they find themselves unexpectedly in another world, without a roadmap, without community, and without narratives to make sense of their experiences. The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future tracks the narratives that have emerged from the community of parent-memoirists who, since the 1980s, have written in resistance of their children's exclusion from culture. Though the disabilities represented in the genre are diverse, the memoirs share a number of remarkable similarities; they are generally written by white, heterosexual, middle or upper-middle class, ablebodied parents, and they depict narratives in which the disabled child overcomes barriers to a normal childhood and adulthood. Apgar demonstrates that in the process of telling these stories, which recuperate their children as productive members of society, parental memoirists write their children into dominant cultural narratives about gender, race, and class. By reinforcing and buying into these norms, Apgar argues, "special needs" parental memoirs reinforce ableism at the same time that they're writing against it.
ISBN: 9780472903030
Publication Date: 2023
Voices in the Band by Susan C. Ball
"I am an AIDS doctor. When I began that work in 1992, we knew what caused AIDS, how it spread, and how to avoid getting it, but we didn't know how to treat it or how to prevent our patients' seemingly inevitable progression toward death. The stigma that surrounded AIDS patients from the very beginning of the epidemic in the early 1980s continued to be harsh and isolating. People looked askance at me: What was it like to work in that kind of environment with those kinds of people? My patients are 'those kinds of people.' They are an array and a combination of brave, depraved, strong, entitled, admirable, self-centered, amazing, strange, funny, daring, gifted, exasperating, wonderful, and sad. And more. At my clinic most of the patients are indigent and few have had an education beyond high school, if that. Many are gay men and many of the patients use or have used drugs. They all have HIV, and in the early days far too many of them died. Every day they brought us the stories of their lives. We listened to them and we took care of them as best we could."--from the Introduction In 1992, Dr. Susan C. Ball began her medical career taking care of patients with HIV in the Center for Special Studies, a designated AIDS care center at a large academic medical center in New York City. Her unsentimental but moving memoir of her experiences bridges two distinct periods in the history of the epidemic: the terrifying early years in which a diagnosis was a death sentence and ignorance too often eclipsed compassion, and the introduction of antiviral therapies that transformed AIDS into a chronic, though potentially manageable, disease. Voices in the Band also provides a new perspective on how we understand disease and its treatment within the context of teamwork among medical personnel, government agencies and other sources of support, and patients. Deftly bringing back both the fear and confusion that surrounded the disease in the early 1990s and the guarded hope that emerged at the end of the decade, Dr. Ball effectively portrays the grief and isolation felt by both the patients and those who cared for them using a sharp eye for detail and sensitivity to each patient's story. She also recounts the friendships, humor, and camaraderie that she and her colleagues shared working together to provide the best care possible, despite repeated frustrations and setbacks. As Dr. Ball and the team at CSS struggled to care for an underserved population even after game-changing medication was available, it became clear to them that medicine alone could not ensure a transition from illness to health when patients were suffering from terrible circumstances as well as a terrible disease.
ISBN: 9780801453625
Publication Date: 2015
Let Burn by Rachel K. Wentz
In 1985, desiring a meaningful, high-paced career in public service, Rachel Wentz left her university studies to become a firefighter/paramedic. Only the eighth woman hired by the Orlando Fire Department, a highly competitive department steeped in tradition, Wentz excelled, completing an AS in Fire Science, a master's in public administration, and numerous specialized training courses to prepare her for an administrative position within the department. Wentz spent eleven years with OFD, experiencing a career that was every bit as exciting and challenging as she had sought. A moving, candid, and eloquent memoir, Let Burn recounts her experiences as a firefighter/paramedic, during which time she witnessed aspects of life and death few people are privy to, experiences that shaped her as a professional and as a person. From the rigorous demands of training to the extraordinary calls Wentz responded to, Let Burn details the gratifying aspects of the field, but also demonstrates the precarious nature of the job: a heated altercation at the scene of an industrial fire leads to Wentz losing almost everything she's worked for and the dramatic end of a storied career. In vivid detail, Let Burn provides a firsthand glimpse into the hidden world of firefighting and emergency medicine.
ISBN: 9781611860719
Publication Date: 2013
The Smoking Book by Lesley Stern
The Smoking Book is a dreamlike structure built on the solid foundation of two questions: how does it feel to smoke, and what does smoking mean? Lesley Stern, in an innovative, hybrid form of writing, muses on these questions through intersecting stories and essays that connect, expand, and contract like smoke rings floating through the air. Stern writes of addictions and passionate attachments, of the body and bodily pleasure, of autobiography and cultural history. Smoking is Stern's seductive pretext, her way of entering unknown and mysterious regions. The Smoking Book begins with intimate and vivid accounts of growing up on a tobacco farm in colonial Rhodesia, reminiscences that permeate subsequent excursions into precolonial tobacco production and postcolonial life in Zimbabwe, as well as dramatic vignettes set in Australia, the United States, Scotland, Italy, Japan, and South America. Stern has written a book, at once intensely personal and kaleidoscopically international, that weaves the intimate act of a solitary person smoking a cigarette into a broad cultural picture of desire, exchange, fulfillment, and the acts that bind people together, either in lasting ways or through ephemeral encounters. The Smoking Book is for anyone who has ever smoked or loved a smoker (against their better judgment); it is for those who have never smoked or for those who mourn the loss of cigarettes as they would grieve for a lost friend. But mostly, The Smoking Book is for all those who are smoldering still.
ISBN: 9780226773322
Publication Date: 2008
Seven Wheelchairs by Gary Presley
In 1959, seventeen-year-old Gary Presley was standing in line, wearing his favorite cowboy boots and waiting for his final inoculation of Salk vaccine. Seven days later, a bad headache caused him to skip basketball practice, tell his dad that he was too ill to feed the calves, and walk from barn to bed with shaky, dizzying steps. He never walked again. By the next day, burning with the fever of polio, he was fastened into the claustrophobic cocoon of the iron lung that would be his home for the next three months. Set among the hardscrabble world of the Missouri Ozarks, sizzling with sarcasm and acerbic wit, his memoir tells the story of his journey from the iron lung to life in a wheelchair. Presley is no wheelchair hero, no inspiring figure preaching patience and gratitude. An army brat turned farm kid, newly arrived in a conservative rural community, he was immobilized before he could take the next step toward adulthood. Prevented, literally, from taking that next step, he became cranky and crabby, anxious and alienated, a rolling responsibility crippled not just by polio but by anger and depression, "a crip all over, starting with the brain." Slowly, however, despite the limitations of navigating in a world before the Americans with Disabilities Act, he builds an independent life. Now, almost fifty years later, having worn out wheelchair after wheelchair, survived post-polio syndrome, and married the woman of his dreams, Gary has redefined himself as Gimp, more ready to act out than to speak up, ironic, perceptive, still cranky and intolerant but more accepting, more able to find joy in his family and his newfound religion. Despite the fact that he detests pity, can spot condescension from miles away, and refuses to play the role of noble victim, he writes in a way that elicits sympathy and understanding and laughter. By giving his readers the unromantic truth about life in a wheelchair, he escapes stereotypes about people with disabilities and moves toward a place where every individual is irreplaceable.
ISBN: 9781587296932
Publication Date: 2008
Robert Lowell, setting the river on fire : a study of genius, mania, and character by ISBN: 1101947969Publication Date: 2017
