Books like The Making of a Surgeon by William A. Nolen

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

A sweeping, family‑centered saga of twin brothers and their father, set against medical practice and the ethical questions of a New York physician.

The House of God exposes the harsh realities of medical training, illustrating a strict hierarchy in hospitals and the pressures faced by residents, interns, physicians, and nurses.

A brilliant anatomist, foul-mouthed and well met, avid empiricist and grave robber, John Hunter cut an astonishing figure in Georgian England. Born in Scotland in 1728, he followed his brother, a renowned physician, to London and into the intellectually grasping, fiercely competitive world of professional medicine. With ample servings of 18th-century filth and gore, the author offers a vivid look at this remarkable period in science history, when many of the most impressive advances were made by relentless iconoclasts like Hunter. In an age when ancient notions of bodily humors still smothered medical thinking, Hunter challenged orthodoxy whenever facts were absent -- which was usually the case. A prodigious experimenter (to the point of obsession) he dissected thousands of corpses and countless animals (many of them living) in his effort to define the nature of the human body. Yet he was also an early adherent of medical minimalism, shunning bloodletting by default and advoc. This book is a richly historical narrative that presents a captivating portrait of Hunter's ruthless devotion to uncovering the secrets of the human body, the extraordinary lengths to which he went to do so, and acknowledges the debt we owe him today for doing so.

Dr. Nolen takes us through the surgical residency and introduces us to the very real world where he was intern and chief resident for five years: New York's Bellevue State Hospital. Funny, compassionate, sometimes tragic, Nolen provides an intimate view of life in the wards, labs and operating rooms of a great hospital. "His book is devastatingly frank...a cornucopia of enthralling stories...an intensely human record of a young surgeon's apprenticeship." (Saturday Review)

Given the tensions and demands of medicine, highly successful physicians and surgeons rarely achieve equal success as prose writers. It is truly extraordinary that a major, international pioneer in the controversial field of transplant surgery should have written a spellbinding, and heart-wrenching, autobiography. Thomas Starzl grew up in LeMars, Iowa, the son of a newspaper publisher and a nurse. His father also wrote science fiction and was acquainted with the writer Ray Bradbury. Starzl left the family business to enter Northwestern University Medical School where he earned both an M.D. and a Ph. D. While he was a student, and later during his surgical internship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, he began the series of animal experiments that led eventually to the world's first transplantation of the human liver in 1963. Until the age of thirty-three, Starzl says, "I felt like a missile looking for a trajectory." His work with liver transplantation gave him a course for life and, despite initial setbacks and failures, he has pursued it relentlessly, eventually achieving stunning success. Throughout his career, first at the University of Colorado and then at the University of Pittsburgh, he has aroused both worldwide admiration and controversy. His technical innovations and medical genius have revolutionized the field, but Starzl has not hesitated to address the moral and ethical issues raised by transplantation. In this book he clearly states his position on many hotly debated issues including brain death, randomized trials for experimental drugs, the costs of transplant operations, and the system for selecting organ recipients from among scores of desperately ill patients. There are many heroes in the story of transplantation, and many "puzzle people," the patients who, as one journalist suggested, might one day be made entirely of various transplanted parts. They are old and young, obscure and world famous. Some have been taken into the hearts of America, like Stormie Jones, the brave and beautiful child from Texas. Every patient who receives someone else's organ - and Starzl remembers each one - is a puzzle. "It was not just the acquisition of a new part," he writes. "The rest of the body had to change in many ways before the gift could be accepted. It was necessary for the mind to see the world in a different way." The surgeons and physicians who pioneered transplantation were also changed: they too became puzzle people. "Some were corroded or destroyed by the experience, some were sublimated, and none remained the same."