Category Archives: Literature – Non-fiction

This category will house non-fiction literature on medicine.

Michelle Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

An emergency room physician explores how a life of service to others taught her how to heal herself.

Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington, DC, in an abusive family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn’t move with her. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman.

In the ensuing years, as Harper learned to become an effective ER physician, bringing insight and empathy to every patient encounter, she came to understand that each of us is broken—physically, emotionally, psychically. How we recognize those breaks, how we try to mend them, and where we go from there are all crucial parts of the healing process. (Goodreads)

Pandemic 1918 by Catharine Arnold

Nowhere escaped this common enemy: in Britain, 250,000 people died, in the United States it was 750,000, five times its total military fatalities in the war, while European deaths reached over two million. The numbers are staggering. And yet at the time, news of the danger was suppressed for fear of impacting war-time morale. Even today these figures are shocking to many – the war still hiding this terrifying menace in its shadow.

Medicine in the Days of the Pharaohs by Bruno Halioua and Bernard Ziskind

Medicine in the Days of the Pharaohs: Bruno Halioua and Bernard Ziskind provide a comprehensive account of pharaonic medicine that is illuminated by what modern science has discovered about the lives (and deaths) of people from all walks of life–farmers, fishermen, miners, soldiers, scribes and priests, embalmers, construction workers, bakers, prostitutes.