Books like Scaphandre et le papillon by Jean-Dominique Bauby

Mitch Albom’s memoir follows his weekly visits to former sociology professor Morrie Schwartz as Schwartz confronts terminal ALS, exploring life, death, and personal growth through their poignant teacher‑student bond.

A surgeon’s investigation of end‑of‑life care urges a shift from mere survival to overall well‑being, blending medical insight with personal stories.

Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi’s poignant memoir chronicles his battle with stage IV metastatic lung cancer and his reflections on life, medicine, and mortality.

From Kay Redfield Jamison - an international authority on manic-depressive illness, and one of the few women who are full professors of medicine at American universities - a remarkable personal testimony: the revelation of her own struggle since adolescence with manic-depression, and how it has shaped her life. Vividly, directly, with candor, wit, and simplicity, she takes us into the fascinating and dangerous territory of this form of madness - a world in which one pole can be the alluring dark land ruled by what Byron called the "melancholy star of the imagination," and the other a desert of depression and, all too frequently, death. A moving and exhilarating memoir by a woman whose furious determination to learn the enemy, to use her gifts of intellect to make a difference, led her to become, by the time she was forty, a world authority on manic-depression, and whose work has helped save countless lives.

The Bright Hour is a moving memoir in which poet Nina Riggs chronicles her life with terminal breast cancer, exploring how to live fully amid death, illness, and the emotional landscape of being a mother and patient.

Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, records the day her left brain failed during a massive stroke and the hours she lived between its loss and the right brain's peace, ultimately tracing her radical recovery and the insights it spurred.

In 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby was the editor in chief of French Elle, the father of two young children, a forty-three-year-old man known and loved for his wit, his style, and his impassioned approach to life. By the end of the year he was also the victim of a rare kind of stroke to the brain stem. After twenty days in a coma, Bauby awoke into a body that had all but stopped working: only his left eye functioned, allowing him to see and, by blinking, to make clear that his mind was unimpaired. Almost miraculously, he was soon able to express himself in the richest detail, blinking to select letters one by one as a special alphabet was slowly recited to him, over and over again. In the same way, he was eventually able to compose this extraordinary book. By turns wistful, mischievous, angry and witty, Bauby bears witness to his determination to live as fully in his mind as he had been able to in his body. He explains the joy, and the deep sadness, of seeing his children and of hearing his aged father's voice on the phone. In magical sequences, he imagines traveling to other places and times; of lying next to the woman he loves. Fed only intravenously, he imagines preparing and tasting the full flavor of delectable dishes. Again and again he returns to an "inexhaustible reservoir of sensations," keeping in touch with himself and the life around him.