Advances in medical technology force us to struggle with new and often gut-wrenching decisions. How do we know when someone is dead and not just in a coma? Should a convicted felon qualify for a new heart? In The Woman Who Decided to Die, novelist and medical ethicist Ronald Munson takes readers to the very edges of medicine, where treatments fail and where people must cope with helplessness, mortality, and doubt. Using personal narratives that place us right next to doctors, pati...

Perhaps no medical breakthrough in the twentieth century is more spectacular, more hope-giving, or more fraught with ethical questions than organ transplantation. Each year some 25,000 Americans are pulled back from the brink of death by receiving vital new organs. Another 5,000 die while waiting for them. And what distinguishes these two groups has become the source of one of our thorniest ethical questions. In Raising the Dead, Ronald Munson offers a vivid, often wrenchingly dra...

**This riveting book from a bestselling author and neurosurgeon explores the unbelievable science that has saved lives and made recovery possible despite all odds."An exciting medical thriller with the compassion, hope, excitement and aspiration that define Sanjay." —Lance Armstrong, Olympic athlete**An unborn baby with a fatal heart defect. A skier submerged for an hour in a frozen Norwegian lake. A comatose brain surgery patient whom doctors have declared a "vegetable".

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING CHLOË GRACE MORETZA “captivating” (The New York Times Book Review), award-winning memoir and instant New York Times bestseller that goes far beyond its riveting medical mystery, Brain on Fire is a powerful account of one woman’s struggle to recapture her identity.When twenty-four-year-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a hospital room, strapped to her bed and unable to move o...

**#1 New York Times BestsellerIn Being Mortal, bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending**Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the huma...

The last collection of true-life nursing stories from the No.1 bestselling author of the CALL THE MIDWIFE series.Jennifer Worth's bestselling memoirs of her time as a midwife have inspired and moved readers of all ages.Now, in IN THE MIDST OF LIFE she documents her experiences as a nurse and ward sister, treating patients who were nearing the end of their lives. Interspersed with these stories from Jennifer's post-midwife career are the histories of her pat...

"Must reading for every physician who cares for patients and every patient who wishes to get the best care." —Time magazineFrom Dr. Jerome Groopman, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and one of the world’s leading researchers in cancer and AIDS, a groundbreaking, profound view of twenty-first-century medical decision-making, giving doctors and patients the vital information they need to ...

In The Night Shift, Dr. Brian Goldman shares his experiences in the witching hours at Mount Sinai Hospital in downtown Toronto. We meet the kinds of patients who walk into an E.R. after midnight: late-night revellers injured on their way home after last call, teens assaulted in the streets by other teens and a woman who punches another woman out of jealousy over a man. But Goldman also reveals the emotional, heartbreaking side of everyday E.R. visits: adult children forced to make...

In 2014, California suffered the largest and deadliest outbreak of pertussis, also known as "whooping cough," in more than fifty years. This tragedy was avoidable. An effective vaccine has been available since the 1940s. In recent years other diseases, like measles and mumps, have also made a comeback. The reason for these epidemics can be traced to a group whose vocal proponents insist, despite evidence to the contrary, that vaccines are poison. As a consequence, parents and caretakers ar...

A journalist " explores the way childbirth has changed, from pre-history to the present" in this "fascinating, funny and occasionally shocking" historical survey ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review).From midwives to the epidural and beyond, mother and former Boston Globe editor Tina Cassidy presents an intelligent, enlightening, and impeccably researched cultural history of how we handle the process of childbirth. W...

If you caught a glimpse of heaven, would you choose to come back to life? Investigative journalist Judy Bachrach has collected accounts of those who died and then returned to life with lucid, vivid memories of what occurred while they were dead, and the conclusions are astonishing. Clinical death—the moment when the heart stops beating and brain stem activity ceases—is not necessarily the end of consciousness, as a number of doctors are now beginning to concede. Hundreds of thousands of fa...

At the centre of the critically acclaimed Fox drama House , British actor Hugh Laurie has become the focus of fans across North America, Britain, and Australia. Winner of the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Dramatic Series, honoured by the Queen with an Order of the British Empire, and one of People 's Sexiest Men Alive, Laurie has become an icon. But who is the man behind the cane and acerbic wit? A musician? A motorcyclist? A comedian? Laurie is all these things and more. This biography...