This Is Going to Hurt was the publishing phenomenon of the century, read by many millions, loved by at least fifty of them, and adapted into a major TV series. But it was only part of the story. By turns hilarious, heartbreaking and humbling, Undoctored is about what happens when a doctor hangs up his scrubs, but medicine refuses to let go of him. Undoctored is Adam Kay's funniest and most moving book yet—an astonishing portrait of a life in and out of medicine, from one of Britain's finest storytellers.

Ed Patrick is an anaesthetist. Strong drugs for his patients, strong coffee for him. But it's not just sleep-giving for this anaesthetist, as he navigates emergencies, patients not breathing for themselves and living with a terrifying sense of responsibility. It's enough to leave anyone feeling numb. But don't worry, there's plenty of laughing gas to be had.

In Being Mortal, best-selling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending. Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit.

Welcome to 97-hour weeks. Welcome to life and death decisions. Welcome to a constant tsunami of bodily fluids. Welcome to earning less than the hospital parking meter. Wave goodbye to your friends and relationships. Welcome to the life of a first-year doctor. Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights, and missed weekends, comedian and former medical resident Adam Kay’s This Is Going to Hurt provides a no-holds-barred account of his time on the front lines of 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.

Professor of psychiatry Elyn R. Saks writes about her struggle with schizophrenia in this unflinching account of her mental illness. In The Center Cannot Hold, Saks draws readers into a nightmare world of medications, a misguided health-care system, and social stigmas. But she would not be defeated. With a strength and force of will that most can only imagine, Saks reclaimed her life and went on to achieve great success.

With compassion and candor, leading neurosurgeon Henry Marsh reveals the fierce joy of operating, the profoundly moving triumphs, the harrowing disasters, the haunting regrets, and the moments of black humor that characterize a brain surgeon's life. If you believe that brain surgery is a precise and exquisite craft, practiced by calm and detached surgeons, this gripping, brutally honest account will make you think again.

Leaving a life marked by crippling setbacks and his father's doubt, in 1967 a 20-something doctor from India arrived in America with only five dollars and the desire to claim his American dream. Faced with an entirely new culture, racism, and the lasting effects of disabling childhood injuries, through hard work and perseverance he overcame all odds. Now having performed over 15,000 open-heart surgeries, more than nearly every surgeon in history, Dr. Singh reflects on his most memorable patients and his incredible personal life.

Dr. Sampson Davis looks at the health-care crisis in the inner city from a rare perspective: as a doctor who works on the front line of emergency medical care in the poor urban neighborhood where he grew up. He also offers practical advice for those living in such communities, where conditions like asthma, heart disease, strokes, obesity, and AIDS are disproportionately endemic. As someone who has struggled with many of the issues troubling his patients, Dr. Davis is able to write with empathy.

In The Nurses, New York Times best-selling author and award-winning journalist Alexandra Robbins peers behind the staff-only door to write a lively, fast-paced story and a riveting work of investigative journalism. Robbins followed real-life nurses in four hospitals and interviewed hundreds of others in a captivating audiobook filled with joy and violence, miracles and heartbreak, dark humor and narrow victories, gripping drama and unsung heroism.

Throughout her recent bout with breast cancer, Letty Cottin Pogrebin became fascinated by her friends’ and family’s diverse reactions to her and her illness: how awkwardly some of them behaved, how some misspoke or misinterpreted her needs, and how wonderful it was when people read her right. She began talking to her fellow patients and dozens of other veterans of serious illness, seeking to discover what sick people wished their friends knew about how best to comfort, help, and even simply talk to them.

While much has been written about the minds and methods of the medical professionals who save our lives, precious little has been said about their emotions. Physicians are assumed to be objective, rational beings, easily able to detach as they guide patients and families through some of life’s most challenging moments. But understanding doctors’ emotional responses to the life-and-death dramas of everyday practice can make all the difference on giving and getting the best medical care.

Christie Watson spent 20 years as a nurse, and in this intimate, poignant, and remarkably powerful audiobook, she opens the doors of the hospital and shares its secrets. She takes us by her side down hospital corridors to visit the wards and meet her unforgettable patients. In the neonatal unit, premature babies fight for their lives, hovering at the very edge of survival, like tiny Emmanuel, wrapped up in a sandwich bag. On the cancer wards, the nurses administer chemotherapy and, long after the medicine stops working, something more important.

Imagine finding a glimmer of good news in a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. And imagine how that would change the outlook of the five million Americans who suffer from Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, not to mention their families, loved ones, and caretakers. A neurologist who's been specializing in dementia and memory loss for more than 20 years, Dr. Gayatri Devi rewrites the story of Alzheimer's by defining it as a spectrum disorder - like autism, Alzheimer's is a disease that affects different people differently.

Modern medical technology is allowing us to live longer and fuller lives than ever before. But with changes in the way we understand medicine come changes in the way we understand death. Once a familiar and gentle process, death has come to be something from which we shy away, preferring to fight it desperately than to accept its inevitability. Palliative care has a long tradition in Britain, where Dr. Kathryn Mannix has practiced it for 30 years. In this book, she shares beautifully crafted stories from a lifetime of caring for the dying.

Hoping for the stability he needs to start a family, Sandeep Jauhar, an attending cardiologist, accepts a position at a massive teaching hospital on the outskirts of Queens. With a decade's worth of elite medical training behind him, he is eager to settle down and reap the rewards of countless sleepless nights. Instead, he is confronted with sobering truths. Doctors' morale is low and getting lower.

With compassion and candor, leading neurosurgeon Henry Marsh reveals the fierce joy of operating, the profoundly moving triumphs, the harrowing disasters, the haunting regrets, and the moments of black humor that characterize a brain surgeon's life. If you believe that brain surgery is a precise and exquisite craft, practiced by calm and detached surgeons, this gripping, brutally honest account will make you think again.

An epic story told by a unique voice in Ameri­can medicine, One Doctor describes life-changing experiences in the career of a distinguished physi­cian. In riveting first-person prose, Dr. Brendan Reilly takes us to the front lines of medicine today.

Imagine finding a glimmer of good news in a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. And imagine how that would change the outlook of the five million Americans who suffer from Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, not to mention their families, loved ones, and caretakers. A neurologist who's been specializing in dementia and memory loss for more than 20 years, Dr. Gayatri Devi rewrites the story of Alzheimer's by defining it as a spectrum disorder - like autism, Alzheimer's is a disease that affects different people differently.

Leaving a life marked by crippling setbacks and his father's doubt, in 1967 a 20-something doctor from India arrived in America with only five dollars and the desire to claim his American dream. Faced with an entirely new culture, racism, and the lasting effects of disabling childhood injuries, through hard work and perseverance he overcame all odds. Now having performed over 15,000 open-heart surgeries, more than nearly every surgeon in history, Dr. Singh reflects on his most memorable patients and his incredible personal life.

The psychiatric emergency room, a fast-paced combat zone with pressure to match, thrusts its medical providers into the outland of human experience where they must respond rapidly and decisively in spite of uncertainty and, very often, danger. In this lively first-person narrative, Paul R. Linde takes listeners behind the scenes at an urban psychiatric emergency room, with all its chaos and pathos, where we witness mental health professionals doing their best to alleviate suffering.

As an active surgeon and former department chairman, Dr. Paul A. Ruggieri has seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of his profession. In Confessions of a Surgeon, he pushes open the doors of the OR and reveals the inscrutable place where lives are improved, saved, and sometimes lost. He shares the successes, failures, remarkable advances, and camaraderie that make it exciting.

Brainstorm follows the stories of people whose medical diagnoses are so strange even their doctor struggles to know how to solve them. A man who sees cartoon characters running across the room; a girl whose world suddenly seems completely distorted, as though she were Alice in Wonderland; another who transforms into a ragdoll whenever she even thinks about moving. The brain is the most complex structure in the universe. Neurologists must puzzle out life-changing diagnoses from the tiniest of clues, the ultimate medical detective work.

Professor of psychiatry Elyn R. Saks writes about her struggle with schizophrenia in this unflinching account of her mental illness. In The Center Cannot Hold, Saks draws readers into a nightmare world of medications, a misguided health-care system, and social stigmas. But she would not be defeated. With a strength and force of will that most can only imagine, Saks reclaimed her life and went on to achieve great success.

San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu (God's hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves - "anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times" and needed extended medical care - ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for 20 years. Laguna Honda, lower-tech but human-paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished.

When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos.

True stories are more bizarre than any fiction, and Dr. Gary Small knows this best. After 30 distinguished years of psychiatry and groundbreaking research on the human brain, Dr. Small has seen it all - now he is ready to open his office doors for the first time and tell all about the most mysterious, intriguing, and bizarre patients of his career. The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head is a spellbinding record of the doctor's most bewildering cases.

In telling the intimate story of caring for her aged and ailing mother, Jane Gross offers indispensable, and often surprising, advice for the rapidly increasing number of adult children responsible for aging parents. Gross deftly weaves the specifics of her personal experience with a comprehensive resource for effectively managing the lives of one's own parents while keeping sanity and strength intact.

No two autistic children heal in exactly the same way. And in her new book, Jenny expands her message to share recovery stories from parents across the country, showing how each parent fought to find her own child's perfect "remedy of interventions." Along the way, Jenny shares her own journey as an autism advocate and mother, as well as the continuing progress of her son, Evan. Emotional and genuinely practical, Mother Warriors will inspire a generation of parents with hope.

Falling into the Fire is psychiatrist Christine Montross's thoughtful investigation of the gripping patient encounters that have challenged and deepened her practice. Beautifully written, deeply felt, Falling into the Fire brings us inside the doctor’s mind, illuminating the grave human costs of mental illness as well as the challenges of diagnosis and treatment. At once rigorous and meditative, Falling into the Fire is an intimate portrait of psychiatry, allowing the reader to witness the humanity of the practice and the enduring mysteries of the mind.