Showing results by publisher "-emdashery books-" in Medical

Oliver Sacks died in August 2015 at his home in Greenwich Village, surrounded by his close friends and family. He was 82. He spent his final days doing what he loved: playing the piano, swimming, enjoying smoked salmon - and writing. As Dr Sacks looked back over his long, adventurous life his final thoughts were of gratitude. In a series of remarkable, beautifully written and uplifting meditations, in Gratitude Dr Sacks reflects on and gives thanks for a life well lived and expresses his thoughts on growing old, facing terminal cancer and reaching the end.

From New York Times best-selling author, Emmy award-winning broadcast journalist, and leading Alzheimer's advocate Meryl Comer comes a profoundly intimate account of her husband's battle with Alzheimer's disease, one of today's most pressing - and least understood - health epidemics.

Pain is part of human existence, but we understand very little of the mechanics of it. We damage ourselves, we feel pain, we seek help from a professional or learn to not do that bad thing again. The story of what goes on in our body is not this simple. Even medical practitioners themselves often fail to grasp the complexities of our minds and bodies and how they interact when dealing with pain stimulus. Throughout history we've tried to prevent it and mediate its affects, resulting in the current situation we find ourselves; highly medicated with a booming opiates industry.

In the summer of 2015, Ross Douthat was moving his family, with two young daughters and a pregnant wife, from Washington, DC, to a sprawling farmhouse in a picturesque Connecticut town when he acquired a mysterious and devastating sickness. It left him sleepless, crippled, wracked with pain - a shell of himself. After months of seeing doctors and descending deeper into a physical inferno, he discovered that he had a disease which, according to CDC definitions, does not actually exist.

In this revelatory memoir, doctor Cynthia Li shares the truth other doctors don’t always understand and often won’t share if they do - that chronic illness is complicated, and that treatment is not just a matter of test results and prescriptions but requires a more comprehensive approach. By sharing her own struggle with a disabling autoimmune crisis, which forced her to question her own conventional medical training and embrace the integrative principles of functional medicine, Li reveals the insider knowledge sufferers need to truly begin healing - mind, body, and spirit.

In this highly personal account, Dr Gibbs documents the effect his diagnosis has had on his life and explains his advocacy for improving early recognition of Alzheimer’s. Weaving clinical knowledge from decades caring for dementia patients with his personal experience of the disease, this is an optimistic tale of one man’s journey with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease.

As a medical detective of the modern world, forensic pathologist Ryan Blumenthal’s chief goal is to bring perpetrators to justice. He has performed thousands of autopsies, which have helped bring numerous criminals to book. In Autopsy he covers the hard lessons learnt as a rookie pathologist, as well as some of the most unusual cases he’s encountered. During his career, for example, he has dealt with high-profile deaths, mass disasters, death by lightning and people killed by African wildlife.

In the summer of 1992, on the eve of an American tour, Ben Watt, one half of the Billboard-topping pop duo Everything but the Girl, was taken to a London hospital complaining of chest pain. He didn't leave for two and a half months.

Ignác Semmelweis is remembered for the now-commonplace notion that doctors must wash their hands before examining patients. In mid-19th century Vienna, however, this was a subversive idea. With deaths from childbed fever exploding, Semmelweis discovered that doctors themselves were spreading the disease. While his simple reforms worked immediately - childbed fever in Vienna all but disappeared - they brought down upon Semmelweis the wrath of the establishment, and led to his tragic end.

By the time she was thirty, Gila Pfeffer was the oldest living member of her family, having lost her mother to breast cancer and her father to colon cancer. A simple blood test confirmed she carried the BRCA1 gene-which put her at high risk of developing cancer herself. Determined to break the cycle of early death in her family, Gila decides to undergo an elective double mastectomy. This memoir follows her journey as she becomes a reluctant expert on how to sit shiva, grows up, falls in love, and enters motherhood, before her life is derailed yet again.

« Ce que j'affectionne par-dessus tout, c'est d'aller à la découverte des traces et des indices, de tous ces éléments qui permettent de donner une dernière fois la parole aux morts et de les écouter dans ce qu'ils ont à dire. » C'est par ces mots que le docteur Philippe Boxho, médecin légiste depuis plus de trente ans, introduit son nouvel ouvrage, dans lequel, une fois encore, assassinats et meurtres se succèdent sans relâche.

In the rolling green hills of Kaipara, Scottish vet Rory Dean and his two fox terriers, Scrappy and Alfie, are on call day and night for whichever animal emergency awaits. In Adventures of a Country Vet, Rory shares stories of the livestock and pets he's cared for as a rural vet in New Zealand and southwest England. From calving in a blizzard to a dog wounded in a pig-hunt, a horse castration gone wrong and warming a baby alpaca in the footwell of his ute, life as a vet is all-go.

Written in 1857, this is the autobiography of a Jamaican woman whose fame rivalled Florence Nightingale's during the Crimean War. Seacole's offer to volunteer as a nurse in the war met with racism and refusal. Undaunted, Seacole set out independently to the Crimea where she acted as doctor and 'mother' to wounded soldiers while running her business, the 'British Hotel'. A witness to key battles, she gives vivid accounts of how she coped with disease, bombardment and other hardships at the Crimean battlefront.

When Dr Arthur Kleinman, an eminent Harvard psychiatrist and social anthropologist, began caring for his wife, Joan, after she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, he found just how far the act of caregiving extended beyond the boundaries of medicine. In The Soul of Care, he delivers a deeply inspiring story about what it means to grapple with illness from both sides, as an experienced doctor and a loving husband. Caregiving is long, hard, unglamorous work - at moments joyous, more often tedious, sometimes agonising, but always rich in meaning.

Sixteen stories of amazing outback doctors and their heroic deeds, from the best-selling author of Nurses of the Outback. Imagine yourself critically injured or seriously ill in the middle of nowhere. You'd be hoping like hell there was a doctor nearby to take charge - someone resourceful, who'd think quickly and stay calm under pressure; someone who could, if necessary, take charge from a distance. You'd want to be in the safe and sure hands of one of these amazing bush doctors.

Psychotherapist Michael Pond is no stranger to the devastating consequences of alcoholism. He has helped hundreds of people conquer their addictions, but this knowledge did not prevent his own near-demise. In this riveting memoir, he recounts how he lost his practice, his home, and his family - all because of his drinking.

Meet Doctor Ben MacFarlane - a very modern flying doctor. His job is get on a plane and bring patients home after holiday disasters, gap year crises, embarrassing incidents on business trips and all the other things that can go wrong when we head overseas. Holiday SOS is his extraordinary story. It’s a unique medical memoir of the people he helps - and a year in the life of one of the world’s most frequent flyers!

When 18-year-old Mary Hazard touched down in postwar Putney to begin her nurse's training, she could never have known that it was the beginning of a colourful career that would still be going 60 years later - one of the longest-ever serving NHS nurses. For Mary, raised in a strict convent in rural south Ireland, working in her first London hospital was a shocking and life-changing experience. Against a backdrop of ongoing rationing and poverty, she saw for the first time the horrors of disease...

In Uncle Tungsten, Oliver Sacks evokes, with warmth and wit, his upbringing in wartime England. He tells of the large science-steeped family who fostered his early fascination with chemistry. There follow his years at boarding school where, though unhappy, he developed the intellectual curiosity that would shape his later life. And we hear of his return to London, an emotionally bereft 10-year-old who found solace in his passion for learning. Uncle Tungsten radiates all the delight and wonder of a boy’s adventures and is an unforgettable portrait of an extraordinary young mind.

A hysterical and sometimes tragic portrayal of a doctor’s interactions with a captivating array of patients contrasted against the frustrations and humdrum of being a junior doctor in the National Health Service. From being the savior of a man’s anus to being mistaken for the milkman, Tom describes the complexity and absurdity of today’s medical practice with humor and aplomb.