Medical Studies Library

Suggested Reads on Life in Medical School

  • A Not Entirely Benign Procedure: Four Years As a Medical Student, Perri Klass, MD
  • Becoming a Doctor:  From Student to Specialist, Doctor-Writers Share their Experiences, Edited by Lee Gutkind
  • Becoming a Doctor, Melvin Konner, MD
  • Everything I Learned in Medical School (Besides All the Book Stuff), Sujay Kansagra, MD
  • Medical School: Getting In, Staying In, Staying Human, Revised Edition, Keith Russell Ablow, MD
  • The Mindful Medical Student: A Psychiatrist’s Guide to Staying Who You Are While Becoming Who You Want to Be, Jeremy Spiegel, MD
  • On Becoming a Doctor:  Everything You Need to Know About Medical School, Residency, Specialization and Practice, Tania Heller, MD
  • The Soul of a Doctor: Harvard Medical Students Face Life and Death, Susan Pories, MD, Sachin H. Jain, and Gordon Harper, MD
  • What Patients Taught Me: A Medical Student’s Journey, Audrey Young, MD
  • White Coat: Becoming a Doctor at Harvard Medical School, Ellen Lerner Rothman, MD

Suggested Reads on Life as a Health Professional

  • African-American Medical Pioneers, Charles H. Epps, Jr., MD, Davis G. Johnson, PhD, and Audrey L. Vaughan, MS
  • A Mindful Life (donated by Jeffrey Chen ’13), Vivekanand Palavali, MD
  • A Not Entirely Benign Procedure:  Four Years as a Medical Student, Revised Edition, Perri Klass, MD
  • Ask Me Why I Hurt: The Kids Nobody Wants and the Doctor Who Heals Them, Randy Christensen, MD with Rene Denfeld
  • The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness, Jerome Groopman, MD
  • Baby ER: The Heroic Doctors and Nurses Who Perform Medicine’s Tiniest Miracles, Edward Humes
  • Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Atul Gawande, MD
  • Blind Eye, James B. Stewart
  • Body of Work: Meditations on Morality from the Human Anatomy Lab, Christine Montross
  • The Changing Face of Medicine: Women Doctors and the Evolution of Health Care in America, Ann K. Boulis and Jerry A. Jacobs
  • The Desire to Heal, Rafael Campo
  • Doctoring: The Nature of Primary Care Medicine, Eric J. Cassell
  • Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis, Lisa Sanders, MD
  • Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality, Pauline W. Chen
  • First, Do No Harm. Lisa Belkin
  • Gesundheit! Patch Adams, MD
  • Healing Our World: Inside Doctors Without Borders, David Morley
  • Hope in Hell:  Inside the World of Doctors Without Borders, Dan Bortolotti
  • Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God, and Diversity on Steroids, Julie Salamon
  • Hot Lights, Cold Steel:  Life, Death and Sleepless Nights in a Surgeon’s First Years, Michael J. Collins, MD 
  • How Doctors Think, Jerome Groopman, MD
  • How We Die:  Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter, Sherwin B. Nuland
  • The Human Side of Medicine: Learning What it’s Like to be a Patient and What it’s Like to be a Physician, Laurence A. Savett, MD
  • Iconoclast:  Abraham Flexner and a Life in Learning, Thomas Neville Bonner
  • Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emergency Cancer Epidemic, Julie Livingston
  • Incidental Findings: Lessons from My Patients in the Art of Medicine, Danielle Ofri, MD
  • Kill as Few Patients as Possible:  And Fifty-Six Other Essays on How to Be the World’s Best Doctor, Oscar London, MD, WBD
  • Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal, Rachel Naomi Remen MD
  • The Knife Man: The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, Father of Modern Surgery, Wendy Moore
  • Letters to a Young Doctor, Richard Selzer
  • Life After Medical School, Leonard Laster, MD
  • Living and Dying in Brick City:  An E.R. Doctor Returns Home, Sampson Davis
  • Love and Modern Medicine, Perri Klass
  • Match Day: One Day and One Dramatic Year in the Lives of Three New Doctors, Brian Eule
  • Miscarriage, Medicine & Miracles. Bruce K. Young ’59, MD, and Amy Zavatto
  • My Grandfather’s Blessings:  Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging. Rachel Naomi Remen, MD
  • My Own Country. Abraham Verghese, MD
  • My Own Medicine: A Doctor’s Life as a Patient. Geoffrey Kurland, MD
  • The Pact:  Three Young Men Make a Promise and Fulfill a Dream, Drs. Sampson Davis, George Jenkins & Rameck Hunt
  • On Being a Doctor, Michael A. LaCombe, MD
  • On Being a Doctor 2: Voices of Physicians and Patients, Michael A. LaCombe, MD
  • On Call in Hell:  A Doctor’s Iraq War Story, CDR. Richard Jadick, with Thomas Hayden
  • The Real Life of a Pediatrician, Perri Klass, MD
  • The Real Life of an Internist, Mark D. Tyler-Lloyd, MD, MPH
  • The Scalpel and The Silver Bear. Lori Arviso Alvord, MD
  • Second Sight:  Views From an Eye Doctor’s Odyssey. David Paton, MD
  • Singular Intimacies, Danielle Ofri, MD
  • Something for the Pain: One Doctor’s Account of Life and Death in the ER, Paul Austin, MD
  • The Soul of Medicine: Tales from the Bedside, Sherwin B. Nuland
  • The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1997, Anne Fadiman
  • Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness, Tracy Kidder
  • Talking With Doctors, David Newman
  • Tell Me Where It Hurts:  A Day of Humor, Healing, and Hope in My Life as an Animal Surgeon, Dr. Nick Trout
  • The Tennis Partner, Abraham Varghese
  • Three 19th-Century Women Doctors: Elizabeth Blackwell, Mary Walker, and Sarah Loguen Fraser, Mary K. LeClaire, Justin D. White and Susan Keeter
  • Time to Heal, Kenneth M. Ludmerer
  • Treatment Kind and Fair:  Letters to a Young Doctor, Perri Klass, MD
  • To Repair the World:  Paul Farmer Speaks to the Next Generation, Paul Farmer
  • What I Learned in Medical School: Personal Stories of Young Doctors, Edited by Kevin M. Takakuwa, Nick Rubashkin, Karen E. Herzig
  • Women in Medicine: Getting in, Growing and Advancing, Janet Bickel
  • The Woman in the Surgeon’s Body, Joan Cassell