Recommended Reads Before Entering Medical School

Pride Month 2024 Reading List by the osteopathic medical education community June 18, 2024

All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today by Elizabeth Comen, MD. Women are diagnosed with cancer and heart disease later than men, aren't offered pain medication as frequently, and far too often find their symptoms dismissed as “all in their heads.” Medical historian and oncologist Elizabeth Comen, MD, traces the cause of these inequities back centuries to the foundational mistruth that women’s bodies — and mental abilities — are inherently inferior to men’s.

An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives by Matt Ritchel. Given the impact of the coronavirus and COVID-19 vaccines on the immune systems, few topics may be as compelling or timely.

And Finally: Matters of Life and Death by Henry Marsh, MD. As a retired brain surgeon, Henry Marsh thought he understood illness, but he was unprepared for the impact of his diagnosis of advanced cancer. And Finally explores what happens when someone who has spent a lifetime on the frontline of life and death finds himself contemplating what might be his own death sentence.

Black Man in a White Coat by Damon Tweedy, MD. One doctor's passionate and profound memoir of his experience grappling with race, bias, and the unique health problems of black Americans. Examines the complex ways in which both black doctors and patients must navigate the difficult and often contradictory terrain of race and medicine. 

Chasing My Cure: A Doctor's Race to Turn Hope into Action; A Memoir by David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc. Doctors were baffled by his condition, which they had yet to even diagnose. Floating in and out of consciousness, Fajgenbaum prayed for a second chance, the equivalent of a dramatic play to second the game into overtime.

Choose Your Medicine: Freedom of Therapeutic Choice in America by Lewis Grossman, PhD, JD. Lewis A. Grossman presents a compelling look at how persistent but evolving notions of a right to therapeutic choice have affected American health policy, law, and regulation from the Revolution through the Trump Era. Grossman grounds his analysis in historical examples ranging from unschooled supporters of botanical medicine in the early nineteenth century to sophisticated cancer patient advocacy groups in the twenty-first.

Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande, MD, MPH. Dr. Gawande shares chilling tales of physician errors and complex stories of medical mysteries. He also explores major issues in medicine, including how hospitals can train young doctors while protecting patients from inexperience. 

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. An enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile, and home. An unforgettable journey into one man’s remarkable life, and an epic story about the power, intimacy, and curious beauty of the work of healing others.

Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh, CBE, FRCS

In Do No Harm, Marsh reviews some of his greatest triumphs and most painful failures, honestly sharing the stress of performing brain surgeries and a glimpse into the hearts of the physicians who have the blessing and the burden of tinkering inside it.

Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century by Dorothy Roberts. An incisive, groundbreaking book that examines how a biological concept of race is a myth that promotes inequality in a supposedly "post-racial" era.

Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law by Haben Girma. Haben defines disability as an opportunity for innovation. She learned non-visual techniques for everything from dancing salsa to handling an electric saw. She developed a text-to-braille communication system that created an exciting new way to connect with people. Haben pioneered her way through obstacles, graduated from Harvard Law, and now uses her talents to advocate for people with disabilities.

How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, by Dorothy E. Roberts. Her work examines how the myth of a biological concept of race promotes inequality in our “supposedly ‘post-racial’ era.”  

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living: Time-Tested Methods for Conquering Worry by Dale Carnegie. With Dale Carnegie’s expert advice, you’ll learn the proven, time-tested principles to break free of worry and anxiety so that you can start living your best life today.

Hundreds of Interlaced Fingers: A Kidney Doctor's Search for the Perfect Match by Vanessa Grubbs, MD. Dr. Grubbs volunteered one of her kidneys to save the life of the man who later became her husband. Grubbs became fascinated by the kidneys and trained to become a nephrologist. In this memoir, she captures her own journey and looks at medicine more broadly, including the painful difficulties of the transplant system and the inequities people of color face in it.

Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Naomi Remen, MD. "Despite the awesome powers of technology, many of us still do not live very well," says Dr. Rachel Remen. "We may need to listen to one another's stories again." Dr. Remen, whose unique perspective on healing comes from her background as a physician, a professor of medicine, a therapist, and a long-term survivor of chronic illness, invites us to listen from the soul.

Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine by Uché Blackstock, MD. As a child, Uché Blackstock, MD, couldn’t wait to follow in her physician mother’s footsteps. But after graduating from Harvard Medical School, she trained as a resident at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, the same under-resourced hospital where her mother worked, and was pained by how deeply the American legacy of racist practices and policies undermined Black people’s health.

Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life by Suzanne Koven, MD.

Watching a new class of interns, Dr. Koven, a primary care physician at MGH in Boston, felt an urge to write to them describing what she wished she had known early in her career. From burnout to body image, she shares her personal journey toward a deeper appreciation of her gifts and a greater acceptance of her imperfections.

Living and Dying in Brick City: An E.R. Doctor Returns Home by Sampson Davis, MD

In this book, Dr. Sampson Davis looks at the healthcare crisis in the inner city from a rare perspective: as a doctor who works on the front line of emergency medical care in the community where he grew up, and as a member of that community who has faced the same challenges as the people he treats every day.

Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep by Kenneth Miller. In 1938, Nathaniel Kleitman, PhD, spent 33 days deep inside a Kentucky cave, avoiding the earth’s cycles of day and night. He hoped to plumb the mysteries of sleep — its strange rhythms, biological purposes, and possible disruptions.

Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracy Kidder. Paul Farmer found his life’s calling: To cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. Tracy Kidder’s magnificent account shows how one person can make a difference in solving global health problems.

Open Heart: A Cardiac Surgeon's Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table by Stephen Westaby, PhD, FRCS. Dr. Westaby has performed more than 11,000 cardiac surgeries. Yet the Oxford University cardiologist and researcher remains enthralled by the organ that pumps 31.5 million times each year. His work requires keen attention to detail, which is one of his strong suits. What is harder for him is sometimes connecting with patients and their families.

Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health by Anupam Jena, MD, PhD. As a University of Chicago–trained economist and Harvard medical school professor and doctor, Anupam Jena is uniquely equipped to answer these questions. And as a critical care doctor at Massachusetts General who researches health care policy, Christopher Worsham confronts their impact on the hospital’s sickest patients. In this singular work of science and medicine, Jena and Worsham show us how medicine really works, and its effect on all of us.

Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People by Tracy Kidder. For decades, Jim O’Connell, MD, has helped care for thousands of Boston’s “rough sleepers” — homeless people who spend their nights on dirty, dangerous streets.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. Mary Roach playfully describes body-snatching, decomposition, and other sensitive topics without dishonoring the dead. As today’s medical educators weigh the value of virtual cadavers against once-living humans, Roach’s book offers a glimpse into the services that corpses have provided for centuries. 

The Curious History of the Heart: A Cultural and Scientific Journey by Vincent M. Figueredo, MD. For centuries, people considered the heart the repository of intelligence, memory, emotion — and even the soul. Ancient Aztecs sacrificed a human heart to the gods, and Egyptian mummification rituals honored the organ, explains cardiologist Vincent Figueredo, MD. But after the heart was revealed as a mechanical pump in the 17th century, the brain — previously deemed “cold gray pudding” — emerged as the home of human consciousness.

The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last by Azra Raza, MD.

2020 saw the arrival of more than 20 new cancer medications. Despite this, Azra Raza, MD, argues for more focus on detecting and treating cancer early. 

The Masters of Medicine: Our Greatest Triumphs in the Race to Cure Humanity’s Deadliest Diseases by Andrew Lam, MD. Human history hinges on the battle to confront our most dangerous enemies—the half-dozen diseases responsible for killing almost all of mankind. The story of our medical triumphs reveals an inspiring tapestry of human achievement, but the journey was far from smooth.

The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore. A true story of two kids with the same name from the city: One went on to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison.

The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine by Ricardo Nuila, MD. Follow the lives of five uninsured Houstonians as their struggle for survival leads them to a hospital that prioritizes people over profit.

The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly: A Physician's First Year by Matt McCarthy, MD. Dr. McCarthy offers an inside look at the often humbling and even heart-wrenching first year of medical residency. McCarthy delves into key concerns for young physicians, including the fine balance between a commitment to patients and the need for self-care.

The Stuff: Unlock Your Power to Overcome Challenges, Soar, and Succeed by Sampson Davis, MD & Sharlee Jeter. We need to realize our own potential—to fight for what we want our lives to be—already resides within each of us. You already have the Stuff. Learning how to develop and harness it is the key.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, by Anne Fadiman. Fadiman shares the story of Lia Lee, the child of Hmong refugees in California who developed intractable epilepsy. The book explores the tension between the Lees' culture and religious beliefs, their expectations of medicine, and the American physicians' culture and expectations of patients within a Western healthcare system. 

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman will change the way you think about thinking. Two systems drive the way we think and make choices: System One is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System Two is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Examining how both systems function within the mind, Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities as well as the biases of fast thinking and the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and our choices.

Truth Worth Telling: A Reporter's Search for Meaning in the Stories of Our Times by Scott Pelley. Truth Worth Telling offers a collection of inspiring tales that remind us of the importance of values in uncertain times. For readers who believe that values matter and that truth is worth telling, Pelley writes, “I have written this book for you.”

Unraveled: Prescriptions to Repair a Broken Health Care System by William Weeks, MD & James Weinstein, CO, MS. William B. Weeks and James N. Weinstein look at the health care experience through the eyes of patients and prescribe practical, effective remedies for a dysfunctional system. They offer simple steps that patients can take now to ensure that their care is effective, efficient, and satisfying and that they have the information necessary to make the best healthcare decisions for themselves and their families. With easy-to-understand language and real-life examples, they explain how and why the health system works as it does, and what we can do to fix it. They give a glimpse of a not-too-distant future where care will be built around the needs of the patients and delivered conveniently, seamlessly, with greater effectiveness, and at lower cost.

We the Scientists: How a Daring Team of Parents and Doctors Forged a New Path for Medicine by Amy Dockser Marcus. Science is often conducted in isolation and geared toward the long view. This is the story of a group of people who tried to force the lab doors open: Parents whose children had been diagnosed with a rare and fatal genetic condition known as Niemann-Pick disease type C.

Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life on the Body in an Unjust Society by Arline Geronimus, DSc. Dr. Arline T. Geronimus coined the term “weathering” to describe the effects of systemic oppression—including racism and classism—on the body. In Weathering, based on more than 30 years of research, she argues that health and aging have more to do with how society treats us than how well we take care of ourselves. She explains what happens to human bodies as they attempt to withstand and overcome the challenges and insults that society leverages at them, and details how this process ravages their health. And she proposes solutions.

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, MD. At the age of thirty-six, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. An unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.

When We Do Harm: A Doctor Confronts Medical Error by Danielle Ofri, MD. Patients enter the medical system with faith that they will receive the best care possible, so when things go wrong, it’s a profound and painful breach. Medical science has made enormous strides in decreasing mortality and suffering, but there’s no doubt that treatment can also cause harm, a significant portion of which is preventable. Danielle Ofri places the issues of medical error and patient safety front and center in our national healthcare conversation.

We Get It: Voices of Grieving College Students and Young Adults by Heather Servaty-Seib, MD & David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc. Inspired by the experiences of Dr. Fajgenbaum losing his mother during college and Dr. Servaty-Seib dedicating her career to college student bereavement, this book will be a lifeline for students and young adults who have lost a loved one. It will also be of immeasurable value to counselors, college administrators, grief professionals, and parents.

Womb With a View: Tales from the Delivery, Emergency and Operating Rooms by Rebecca Levy-Gantt, DO. Throughout this book, Gantt shares moments of sublime joy while also capturing tough moments witnessing fragile lives enter the world.

Adapted and added to the recommendations from: AAMC Outreach Specialist Alexandra Mazzarisi.