Medical Memoir

Karen Duffy’s second book, Backbone: Living with Chronic Pain Without Turning into One, is meant to be a funny and motivational read. Duffy has certainly lived through more days of illness and pain than not. And she has some celebrity cred which adds a bit to the...

If you’ve ever used the bright blue or green mouthwash with the antiseptic taste, then you have benefitted from the expertise of Joseph Lister. More importantly, if you’ve had surgery in a spotlessly clean operating room with a surgeon gowned and gloved up, you owe...

Nina Riggs wrote The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying as she was being treated for stage four breast cancer, the kind that's become only treatable, not curable. During the same time, Nina was saying goodbye to her mother, who had the same disease and...

Dr. Clark Elliott's medical memoir, The Ghost in My Brain, is one of the best I've read. Elliott, who is a PhD teaching Artificial Intelligence in Chicago, describes the effects of a concussion like nothing else I've seen. To discuss the resulting book and it's...

Roxane Gay's memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body is exquisitely emotionally raw. If my closest friend poured her deepest, darkest secrets out to me, it couldn't begin to be this vulnerable. It hurt my heart to read chapter after chapter of Gay's lifetime of...