Called To Be A Surgeon

Promotes the recognition, treatment, and prevention of conditions of overweight and obesity in the United States.

**THE MILLION COPY BESTSELLER** 'Rattling. Heartbreaking. Beautiful,' Atul Gawande, bestselling author of Being Mortal What makes life worth living in the face of death? At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity - the brain - and finally into a patient and a new father. Paul Kalanithi died while working on this profoundly moving book, yet his words live on as a guide to us all. When Breath Becomes Air is a life-affirming reflection on facing our mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both. 'A vital book about dying. Awe-inspiring and exquisite. Obligatory reading for the living' Nigella Lawson

An orphan leaves Dark Ages London to study medicine in Persia in this “rich” and “vivid” historical novel from a New York Times–bestselling author (The New York Times). A child holds the hand of his dying mother and is terrified, aware something is taking her. Orphaned and given to an itinerant barber-surgeon, Rob Cole becomes a fast-talking swindler, peddling a worthless medicine. But as he matures, his strange gift—an acute sensitivity to impending death—never leaves him, and he yearns to become a healer. Arab madrassas are the only authentic medical schools, and he makes his perilous way to Persia. Christians are barred from Muslim schools, but claiming he is a Jew, he studies under the world’s most renowned physician, Avicenna. How the woman who is his great love struggles against her only rival—medicine—makes a riveting modern classic. The Physician is the first book in New York Times–bestselling author Noah Gordon’s Dr. Robert Cole trilogy, which continues with Shaman and concludes with Matters of Choice.

“I am a doctor.” Every year, thousands of medical school graduates utter these four simple words. But as you will see in Playing God, earning an M.D. is just the first step to becoming a real physician. In this page-turning, thrilling, and moving memoir, Dr. Anthony Youn reveals that the true metamorphosis from student to doctor occurs not in medical school but in the formative years of residency training and early practice. It is only through actually saving and losing patients, taking on the medical establishment, wrestling with financial and emotional survival, and fighting for patients’ lives that a young doctor becomes a mature and competent physician. Dr. Youn takes you from the operating rooms of a university surgery residency program to the gleaming offices of top Beverly Hills plastic surgeons to opening the doors of his empty clinic as a new doctor with no money, no patients, and mountains of debt. Playing God leaves you with an unexpected answer to that profound question: “What does it mean to be a doctor?” In Playing God, you will take a journey through the world of surgery, hospitals, and the practice of medicine unlike any that you have traveled before.

In her most masterful novel of medical suspense, New York Times bestselling author Tess Gerritsen creates a villain of unforgettable evil--and the one woman who can catch him before he kills again.

A brilliant and courageous doctor reveals, in gripping accounts of true cases, the power and limits of modern medicine. Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside with one's own eyes. This book is exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is -- complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human. Atul Gawande offers an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge, where science is ambiguous, information is limited, the stakes are high, yet decisions must be made. In dramatic and revealing stories of patients and doctors, he explores how deadly mistakes occur and why good surgeons go bad. He also shows us what happens when medicine comes up against the inexplicable: an architect with incapacitating back pain for which there is no physical cause; a young woman with nausea that won't go away; a television newscaster whose blushing is so severe that she cannot do her job. Gawande offers a richly detailed portrait of the people and the science, even as he tackles the paradoxes and imperfections inherent in caring for human lives. At once tough-minded and humane, Complications is a new kind of medical writing, nuanced and lucid, unafraid to confront the conflicts and uncertainties that lie at the heart of modern medicine, yet always alive to the possibilities of wisdom in this extraordinary endeavor. Complications is a 2002 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

The inspiring and thrilling stories of surgical challenges around the world, which include the life situation of the patients, key elements of the surgery, and the providence and provision of God over many years to overcome what would be considered an impossible "on call" schedule. Born to missionary medical parents in China, Harold Paul Adolph felt called to medical service early in life. When his life was repeatedly snatched from death's jaws, he knew that he was on assignment from God. He felt led by God to work as a surgeon in places with few surgeons and later to train surgeons to carry on this ministry for the sake of the gospel. Since 1966, Dr. Adolph and his wife, Bonnie Jo, have served in Ethiopia, Wheaton, in short-terms around the world, Liberia, Niger Republic, the USA, and Ethiopia, setting up a two-hundred-bed surgical training center in South Central Ethiopia with a dedicated staff of expatriate and Ethiopian specialists. Both their children, David and Carolyn Joy, serve as missionaries in Africa.

Dr. James Burt believed women’s bodies were broken, and only he could fix them. In the 1950s, this Ohio OB-GYN developed what he called “love surgery,” a unique procedure he maintained enhanced the sexual responses of a new mother, transforming her into “a horny little house mouse.” Burt did so without first getting the consent of his patients. Yet he was allowed to practice for over thirty years, mutilating hundreds of women in the process. It would be easy to dismiss Dr. Burt as a monstrous aberration, a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein. Yet as medical historian Sarah Rodriguez reveals, that’s not the whole story. The Love Surgeon asks tough questions about Burt’s heinous acts and what they reveal about the failures of the medical establishment: How was he able to perform an untested surgical procedure? Why wasn’t he obliged to get informed consent from his patients? And why did it take his peers so long to take action? The Love Surgeon is both a medical horror story and a cautionary tale about the limits of professional self-regulation.

A beautifully written and compelling memoir of a largely unexplored area of medicine: transplant surgery. Leading transplant surgeon Dr Joshua Mezrich creates life from loss, moving organs from one body to another. In this intimate, profoundly moving work, he examines more than one hundred years of remarkable medical breakthroughs, connecting this fascinating history with the stories of his own patients. Gripping and evocative, How Death Becomes Life takes us inside the operating room and presents the stark dilemmas that transplant surgeons must face daily: How much risk should a healthy person be allowed to take to save someone she loves? Should a patient suffering from alcoholism receive a healthy liver? The human story behind the most exceptional medicine of our time, Mezrich's riveting book is a poignant reminder that a life lost can also offer the hope of a new beginning.