Books like Surgery by the sea by Sheila Douglas

When Breath Becomes Air is a non-fiction autobiographical book written by American neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi. It is a memoir about his life and illness, battling stage IV metastatic lung cancer. It was posthumously published by Random House on January 12, 2016.

As in all hospitals, the medical hierarchy of The House of God was a pyramid - a lot at the bottom and one at the top. Put another way, it was like an ice-cream cone...you had to lick your way up!Roy Basch, the 'red-hot' Rhodes Scholar, thought differently - but then he hadn't met Hyper Hooper, out to win the most post-mortems of the year award, nor Molly, the nurse with the crash helmet. He hadn't even met any of the Gomers ('Get Out of My Emergency Room!'), the no-hopers who wanted to die but who were worth more alive...The House of God is a wild and raunchily irreverent novel that teaches you the not-so-gentle arts of healing, and tells you what your doctor never wanted you to know. It is the best medicine since M*A*S*H, and does for the doctor's art what Catch-22 did for the art of war.

"This funny, candid memoir about the author's intern year at a New York hospital provides a scorchingly frank look at how doctors are made, taking readers into the critical care unit to see one burgeoning physician's journey from ineptitude to competence. After his professional baseball career failed to launch, Matt McCarthy went to Harvard Medical School and on to a coveted residency slot in New York. But when he almost lost a patient on his first day after making what he believed to be a terrible error, he found himself facing the harsh reality of a new doctor's life--one in which even overachievers find themselves humbled, and in which med school training has little to offer in navigating the emotional rollercoaster of dealing with actual patients. Luckily for McCarthy, his second-year-resident adviser (whom he calls "Baio", owing to a resemblance to a Charles in Charge-era Scott Baio) was an offbeat genius, with a knack for breaking down the complicated process of treating patients. But neither doctor could offer much help to a patient named Barney, who had been living in the hospital while waiting for a new heart, and whom McCarthy slowly befriended over the course of the year in ways that changed his perception of what it means to be a physician. Mixing the tense drama of ER with the screwball humor of Scrubs, McCarthy offers a window on to hospital life that dispenses with sanctimony and self-seriousness while emphasizing the black-comic paradox of becoming a doctor: How do you learn how to save lives in a job where there is no practice? This "One L for doctors" will inspire and entertain physicians and patients alike"-- "A young doctor stumbles through his experience as a first year intern at a major New York hospital"--

From back cover: After three years on the beautiful Isles of Nowhere in the Indian Ocean, Dr Helen French feels confident that she can cope with almost anything. But although the islands seem like Paradise, feelings are apt to run higher than in cooler climes, and when Helen falls foul of Geoff McLeod, the resident dental officer, she finds herself out of her depth. In fact, she soon realises that she is much more experienced in her work than in emotional entanglements …