Genres > Health

Medicine

New Releases Tagged "Medicine"

The Black Death: A Global History of Humanity's Most Devastating Pandemic

The New Menopause: Navigating Your Path Through Hormonal Change with Purpose, Power, and Facts

The Madness Pill: One Doctor's Quest to Understand Schizophrenia

You've Been Pooping All Wrong: How to Make Your Bowel Movements a Joy

Beyond Inheritance: Our Ever-Mutating Cells and a New Understanding of Health

Lists

It Lives in The Basement by Sahara Foley

3X3 Best Fantasy Or Sci Fi Reads

75 books — 85 voters

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman

Nobel Prize in ANYTHING BUT Literature

148 books — 59 voters

A Brief History of Time by Stephen W. Hawking

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Science Writing

288 books — 149 voters

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Medicine and Literature

1,989 books — 2,240 voters

The End of Alzheimer's by Dale E. Bredesen

Beyond the Fountain of Youth by Julian Robert Gershon Jr.

Healthy Aging

402 books — 141 voters

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting

Is There a Doctor in the Title?

789 books — 45 voters

Related Genres

Nonfiction
Health

Featured News & Interviews

Readers’ Most Read Books of the Reading Challenge (So Far)

Read »

“ The night before brain surgery, I thought about death. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or in peaceful surrender? What sort of character did I hope to show? Was I content with myself and what I had done with my life so far? I decided that I was essentially a good person, although I could have been better--but at the same time I understood that the cancer didn't care. I asked myself what I believed. I had never p The night before brain surgery, I thought about death. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or in peaceful surrender? What sort of character did I hope to show? Was I content with myself and what I had done with my life so far? I decided that I was essentially a good person, although I could have been better--but at the same time I understood that the cancer didn't care. I asked myself what I believed. I had never prayed a lot. I hoped hard, I wished hard, but I didn't pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organized religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. Quite simply, I believed I had a responsibility to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking, and honorable. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn't a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough. At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptized. If there was indeed a God at the end of my days, I hoped he didn't say, 'But you were never a Christian, so you're going the other way from heaven.' If so, I was going to reply, 'You know what? You're right. Fine.' I believed, too, in the doctors and the medicine and the surgeries--I believed in that. I believed in them. A person like Dr. Einhorn [his oncologist], that's someone to believe in, I thought, a person with the mind to develop an experimental treatment 20 years ago that now could save my life. I believed in the hard currency of his intelligence and his research. Beyond that, I had no idea where to draw the line between spiritual belief and science. But I knew this much: I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe--what other choice was there? We do it every day, I realized. We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery. To continue believing in yourself, believing in the doctors, believing in the treatment, believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing, I decided. It had to be. Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every single day. And it will beat you. I didn't fully see, until the cancer, how we fight every day against the creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle daily against the slow lapping of cynicism. Dispiritedness and disappointment, these were the real perils of life, not some sudden illness or cataclysmic millennium doomsday. I knew now why people fear cancer: because it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirit. So, I believed. ...more ”
― Lance Armstrong, It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life

100 likes