GREAT RESOURCES FOR RESIDENCY
BOOK CLUB
FOR THE WARDS:
The following are books that previous residents found useful for the wards.
POCKET MEDICINE 6TH EDITION
Marc S. Sabatine
Designed as a life-saver for Rounds, the Pocket Series serves as a practical, high-yield reference for quick answers to diagnostic questions. Under the direction of esteemed faculty at premier institutions, each title in the Pocket series is written by residents and fellows and the highly template format helps residents and students intelligently answer questions from Attendings.
THE WASHINGTON MANUAL OF MEDICAL THERAPEUTICS
Pavan Bhat, Alexandra Dretler, Mark Gdowski, Rajeev Ramgopal, Dominique Williams
Concise and user-friendly, The Washington Manual of Medical Therapeutics, 35th Edition, focuses on the essential information you need to know for successful patient care. Written by residents who are assisted by faculty co-authors and an outstanding editorial team, this must-have reference presents brief, logical approaches to diagnosis and management of commonly encountered medical conditions, including new therapies that improve patient outcomes. Thoroughly updated throughout, the 35th Edition provides a clear view of the challenges faced by residents, interns, medical students, and other practitioners, plus offers practical solutions, and expert guidance – all in one convenient and easily accessible source.
FOR THE SPIRIT:
Books to question the practice of Medicine, provide inspiration, or reflect upon the past and future of Medicine.
THE SPIRIT CATCHES YOU AND YOU FALL DOWN
by Anne Fadiman
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down explores the clash between a small county hospital in California and a refugee family from Laos over the care of Lia Lee, a Hmong child diagnosed with severe epilepsy. Lia's parents and her doctors both wanted what was best for Lia, but the lack of understanding between them led to tragedy. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest, and the Salon Book Award, Anne Fadiman's compassionate account of this cultural impasse is literary journalism at its finest. The current edition, published for the book's fifteenth anniversary, includes a new afterword by the author that provides updates on the major characters along with reflections on how they have changed Fadiman's life and attitudes.
Recommended by Dr. Kennedy
ILLNESS AS METAPHOR
by Susan Sontag
In 1978 Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as "one of the most liberating books of its time." A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is--just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed.
Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel to Illness as Metaphor, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic.
These two essays now published together, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.
Recommended by Dr. Kennedy
THE DOCTOR STORIES
by William Carlos Williams
Compiled by Dr. Robert Coles
These writings, together with Dr. Robert Coles's enthusiastic appraisal of teaching Williams and Dr. William Eric Williams's personal and touching filial account, "My Father, the Doctor," make up an intriguing and timely study of the poet as a physician of rare humanity and self-knowledge. As Coles suggests, Dr. Williams's writing can help many others take a knowing look at the medical profession.
Recommended by Dr. Kennedy
ON THE MOTION OF THE HEART AND BLOOD IN ANIMALS
by William Harvey
William Harvey (1578-1657) was a rebel in medical science: Contrary to contemporary practice, he began his epoch-making investigation into the action of the heart and the blood's circulation by minutely observing their action in live animals and by a lengthy series of dissections, rather than by mere reliance on the anatomical lessons of ancient medicine and philosophy. "On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals", including explanations of heart valves and arterial pulse, stands as a triumph of true scientific inquiry, and is still regarded as one of the greatest discoveries in physiology.
Recommended by Dr. Kennedy
THE SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN MEDICINE
by Paul Starr
Considered the definitive history of the American healthcare system, The Social Transformation of American Medicine examines how the roles of doctors, hospitals, health plans, and government programs have evolved over the last two and a half centuries. How did the financially insecure medical profession of the nineteenth century become a most prosperous one in the twentieth century? Why was national health insurance blocked? And why are corporate institutions taking over our medical care system today? Beginning in 1760 and coming up to the present day, renowned sociologist Paul Starr traces the decline of professional sovereignty in medicine, the political struggles over healthcare, and the rise of a corporate system
Recommended by Dr. Kennedy
IMAGINE WHAT IT’S LIKE: A LITERATURE AND MEDICINE ANTHOLOGY
by Ruth Nadelhaft and Victoria Bonebakker
The intersection of wisdom and science is the territory of this anthology--ground that is contested, sometimes harrowing, and often ennobling.
The human experience of health care, whether ancient or modern, has always engaged those who practice it and those who encounter it as patients. Both those who live with illness of body and mind, and those who live and work alongside the patients, crave the opportunity to reflect on their experiences. In recent years, practitioners and patients alike have called attention to a crisis in our collective experience of medicine. There is a growing awareness of very different cultural expectations about the nature and treatment of illness.
The intersection of medicine and the humanities is busy. Machinery seems to crowd the space, while human encounters are often brief and deeply unsatisfying to patients and caregivers alike. Despite disparate approaches to the crisis in health care--from economics to ethics--there is agreement that patients and the world of medicine need more time together, so that illness does not find expression only in the context of the emergency room.
It is as a response to the collective sense of crisis and alienation that Imagine What It's Like has been constructed. Inside and outside the health care community, many have called for the chance to use the humanities not only as opportunities to reflect on their own experiences, but also as a means of improving the experiences of all of us whose lives will be touched by illness and healing, birth and death.
Created by the Maine Humanities Council for its Literature and Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care programs, Imagine What It's Like contains eighty-three selections ranging from poems to short stories to excerpts from longer works. The selections are divided into five sections--The Experience of Illness, Beginnings and Endings, Trauma and Recovery, Coming to Terms, and Healing Costs--and are followed by suggestions for longer readings.
Recommended by Dr. Kennedy
RECOMMENDATIONS FROM RESIDENTS:
This is a list of books that residents from the program found interesting, fun, or memorable. Enjoy!
BETTER
by Atul Gawande
The struggle to perform well is universal: each of us faces fatigue, limited resources, and imperfect abilities in whatever we do. But nowhere is this drive to do better more important than in medicine, where lives may be on the line with any decision.
Atul Gawande, the New York Times bestselling author of Complications, examines, in riveting accounts of medical failure and triumph, how success is achieved in this complex and risk-filled profession. At once unflinching and compassionate, Better is an exhilarating journey, narrated by "arguably the best nonfiction doctor-writer around" (Salon.com).
OVERDIAGNOSED: MAKING PEOPLE SICK IN THE PURSUIT OF HEALTH
by H. Gilbert Welch
A complex web of factors has created the phenomenon of overdiagnosis: the popular media promotes fear of disease and perpetuates the myth that early, aggressive treatment is always best; in an attempt to avoid lawsuits, doctors have begun to leave no test undone, no abnormality overlooked; and profits are being made from screenings, medical procedures, and pharmaceuticals. Revealing the social, medical, and economic ramifications of a health-care system that overdiagnoses and overtreats patients, Dr. H. Gilbert Welch makes a reasoned call for change that would save us pain, worry, and money.
HOW DOCTORS THINK
by Jerome Groopman
How Doctors Think is a window into the mind of the physician and an insightful examination of the all-important relationship between doctors and their patients. In this myth-shattering work, Jerome Groopman explores the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make. He pinpints why doctors succeed and why they err. Most important, Groopman shows when and how doctors can -- with our help -- avoid snap judgments, embrace uncertainty, communicate effectively, and deploy other skills that can profoundly impact our health.