Select a tab for a list of books on that topic available at the MSUM library or another local library.
Books available at MSUM will link to the record in the catalog. Books available locally will be indicated.
Books available at local libraries may be checked out as indicated by their policies or requested through Interlibrary Loan to be picked up at the MSUM Library. MSUM students can check out books from any Tri-College library with their Dragon ID.
Public libraries require people to create an account to check out books - each public library has their own requirements, but in general, you will need a photo ID to create an account. Student IDs may be accepted.
Books in this list come, in part, from a list curated by the NAAHP Communications Committee (2016).
This list is not exhaustive of books on the given topics available at the MSUM library or available through Interlibrary Loan.
Abbreviation Key:
B-what it’s like to become a physician: the medical student and resident experience
C-choosing a career in health care
D-patient diversity
P-what it’s like to be a physician
Pt-what it’s like to be a patient
Alvord, Lori and Elizabeth Cohen Van Pelt. The Scalpel and the Silver Bear: The First Navajo Woman Surgeon Combines Western Medicine and Traditional Healing. Bantam, 2000.
Chong, Nilda. The Latino Patient: A Cultural Guide for Health Care Providers. Intercultural Press, 2002.
Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2002.
Galanti, Geri Ann. Caring for Patients from Different Cultures: Case Studies from American Hospitals. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. D
Roth, Philip. Patrimony: A True Story. Vintage, 1996.
Gevitz, Norman. The D.O.'s: Osteopathic Medicine in America. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982.
Available at Concordia.
Gutkin, Lee, ed. I Wasn't Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse. In Fact Books, 2013. B
Lasker, Judith. Hoping to Help: The Promises and Pitfalls of Global Health Volunteering. ILR Press, 2016.
Brooks, Geraldine. Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague. Penguin Books, 2002.
Friedman, Meyer and Gerald Friedland. Medicine’s 10 Greatest Discoveries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
Available at Concordia and local libraries.
Gevitz, Norman. The D.O.’s: Osteopathic Medicine in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
Available at Concordia
Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown Publishers, 2010.
Ludmerer, Kenneth. Time to Heal: American Medical Education from the Turn of the Century to Managed Care. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Martin, Emily. Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.
Nuland, Sherwin. Doctors: the Biography of Medicine. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. P
Available at Concordia.
Rothman, Sheila. Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History. New York: Basic Books, 1994.
Available at Concordia.
Salmon, J. Warren. The Corporate Transformation of Health Care: Perspectives and Implications. Amityville, NY: Baywood Pub. Co, 1990.
Available at Concordia.
Starr, Paul. The Social Transformation of American Medicine. New York: Basic Books, 1982.
Washington, Harriet. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to Present. New York: Doubleday, 2006.
Young, James Harvey. American Health Quackery: Collected Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Available at Concordia.
Young, James Harvey. The Medical Messiahs, a Social History of Health Quackery in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967.
Beauchamp, Tom. Intending Death: The Ethics of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997.
Beauchamp, Tom and James Childress. Principles of Biomedical Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006.
Gorovitz, Samuel. Drawing the Line: Life, Death, and Ethical Choices in an American Hospital. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Holtkamp, Sue. Wrapped in Mourning: The Gift of Life and Donor Family Trauma. New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2002.
Available at MSCTC.
Jonsen, Albert. A Short History of Medical Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Lantos, John, and William Meadow. Neonatal Bioethics: The Moral Challenges of Medical Innovation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
Malcolm, Andrew. Someday: The Story of a Mother and Her Son. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992.
Available at Concordia.
Quill, Timothy. Death and Dignity: Making Choices and Taking Charge. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1993.
Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown Publishers, 2010.
Snyder, Lois and Arthur Caplan. Assisted Suicide: Finding Common Ground. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002.
Tauber, Alfred. Confessions of a Medicine Man: An Essay in Popular Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Teresi, Dick. The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating-Heart Cadavers – How Medicine is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012.
Available at Concordia and local libraries.
Gray, Ryan. The Premed Playbook Guide to the Medical School Personal Statement: Write Your Best Story, Secure Your Interview. New York: Morgan James Publishing, 2018.
Holt, Terrence. Internal Medicine: A Doctor’s Stories. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2014. B
Ludmerer, Kenneth. Time to Heal: American Medical Education from the Turn of the Century to the Era of Managed Care. Oxford University Press, 1999.
Maguire, Mary Ann. PreMed: Who Makes It and Why? New York: Teachers College Press, 1999.
See, Christopher. Succeed in your Medical School Interview: Stand Out from the Crowd and Get into your Chosen Medical School. London: Kogan Page, 2015.
Takakuwa, Kevin, Nick Rubashkin, and Karen Herzig, eds. What I learned in Medical School: Personal Stories of Young Doctors. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. B
Young, Audrey. What Patients Taught Me: A Medical Student’s Journey. Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2004. P
Available at Concordia.
Why should you read fiction?
Read more about the importance of reading fiction here.
Genova, Lisa. Still Alice. New York: Pocket Books, 2009. P
A compelling novel about a 50-year-old woman's sudden descent into early onset Alzheimer's disease, written by Lisa Genova, who holds a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard University.
Green, John. The Fault in Our Stars. New York: Dutton Books, 2012. Pt
Sixteen-year-old Hazel, a stage IV thyroid cancer patient, has accepted her terminal diagnosis until a chance meeting with a boy at cancer support group forces her to reexamine her perspective on love, loss, and life.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962. P
A work of epic scope that centers on the intersecting lives of the inhabitants of the fictitious titular town of Middlemarch, including new doctor Tertius Lydgate.
Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2002.
Follows three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, narrated by intersex Cal, who uncovers a guilty family secret and an astonishing genetic history.
Lewis, Sinclair. Arrowsmith. New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1925. P
Written in the period after the reforms of medical education flowing from the Flexner Report on Medical Education in the United States and Canada, 1910, which had called on medical schools in the United States to adhere to mainstream science in their teaching and research.
Shem, Samuel. The House of God. New York: R. Marek Publishers, 1978. B
Struggling with grueling hours and sudden life-and-death responsibilities, Basch and his colleagues, under the leadership of their rule-breaking senior resident, must learn not only how to be fine doctors but, eventually, good human beings.
Verghese, Abraham. Cutting for Stone. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. B
Available at local libraries.
Marion and Shiva Stone are orphaned twin brothers bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine who come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.
Block, Jennifer. Everything Below the Waist: Why Health Care Needs a Feminist Revolution. New York: St. martin's Press, 2019.
Cassell, Eric. Doctoring: The Nature of Primary Care Medicine. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. P
Colgrove, Melba, Harold Bloomfield, and Peter McWilliams. How to Survive the Loss of a Love. Los Angeles, CA: Prelude Press, 1991. Pt
Crichton, Michael. Five Patients: The Hospital Explained. New York: Knopf, 1970. P, Pt
Dwass, Emily. Diagnosis Female: How Medical Bias Endangers Women's Health. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.
Dweck, Carol. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House, 2017.
Galanti, Geri Ann. Caring for Patients from Different Cultures: Case Studies from American Hospitals. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. D
Gawande, Atul. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2014.
Gawande, Atul. The Checklist Manifesto. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010. P
Groopman, Jerome. How Doctors Think. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. P
Groopman, Jerome. Second Opinions: Stories of Intuition and Choice in the Changing World of Medicine. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
Iserson, Kenneth. Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies? Arizona: Galen Press, 2001.
Available at Concordia.
Martin, Emily. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. D
Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science. New York: TED Books, Simon & Schuster, 2015. P
Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. New York: Scribner, 2010.
Nechas, Eileen, and Denise Foley. Unequal Treatment: What You Don't Know About How Women are Treated by the Medical Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. D
Ofri, Danielle. What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine. Boston: Beacon Press, 2013. P
Purtilo, Ruth, and Amy Marie Haddad. Health Professional and Patient Interaction, 5th Edition. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1996. P, Pt
Spiro, Howard. Empathy and the Practice of Medicine: Beyond the Pill and Scalpel. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. P, Pt
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors. New York: Doubleday, 1990. Pt, D
Verkerk, Marian. What About the Family? Practices in Responsibility in Care. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Washington, Harriet. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Doubleday, 2006.
Adams, Patch, and Maureen Mylander. Gesundheit!. Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press P
Albom, Mitch. Tuesdays with Morrie. New York: Doubleday, 1997.
Alvord, Lori Arviso, and Elizabeth Cohen Van Pelt. The Scalpel and the Silver Bear. New York: Bantam Books, 1999.
Belkin, Lisa. First Do No Harm. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. P
Bickel, Janet. Women in Medicine: Getting in, Growing, and Advancing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1983. P, B
Biro, David. One Hundred Days: My Unexpected Journey from Doctor to Patient. New York: Pantheon, 2000. P
Brody, Howard. Stories of Sickness. Oxford, New York: Basic Books, 2003. P, Pt
Butler, Katy. Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death. New York: Scribner, 2013.
Cahalan, Susannah. Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness. New York: Free Press, 2012 Pt
Carson, Ben. Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1991. P
Cassell, Joan. The Woman in the Surgeon's Body. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. P
Chen, Pauline. Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. P
Chin, Eliza, ed. This Side of Doctoring: Reflections from Women in Medicine. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002. P
Coles, Robert, and Randy-Michael Testa. A Life in Medicine: A Literary Anthology. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. INC., 2003. P
Coles, Robert. The Call of Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. P, Pt
Collins, Michael. Hot Lights, Cold Steel: Life, Death and Sleepless Nights in a Surgeon's First Years. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005. P
Davis, Sampson, and Lisa Frazier Page. Living and Dying in Brick City: Stories from the Front Lines of an Inner-City E.R. New York: Spiegel & Grau Trade Paperbacks, 2013
Fadiman, Anne. The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down. New York: The Noonday Press, 1997. P, Pt
Fink, Sheri. Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital. New York: Crown Publishers, 2013.
Firlik, Katrina. Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside. New York: Random House, 2006. B, P
Frank, Arthur. At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991. Pt
Garrett, Susan. Taking Care of Our Own: A Year in the Life of a Small Hospital. New York: Dutton, 1994. P
Gawande, Atul. Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance. New York: Metropolitan, 2007. P
Gawande, Atul. Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002. P
Grim, Pamela. Just Here Trying to Save a Few Lives: Tales of Life and Death from the ER. New York: Warner Books. 2002. P
Groopman, Jerome. The Measure of Our Days. New York: Penguin, 1998. P, Pt
Available at Concordia and local libraries.
Hilfiker, David. Healing the Wounds: A Physician Looks at his Work. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. P
Hilfiker, David. Not all of us are Saints. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994. P, Pt
Humes, Edward. BABY ER: The Heroic Doctors and Nurses Who Perform Medicine’s Tiniest Miracles. Simon & Schuster, 2000. P
Huyler, Frank. The Blood of Strangers: Stories from Emergency Medicine. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. P
Jadick, Richard, and Thomas Hayden. On Call in Hell: A Doctor’s Iraq War Story. New York: NAL Caliber, 2007. P
Kalanithi, Paul. When Breath Becomes Air. New York: Random House, 2016.
Kidder, Tracy. Mountains Beyond Mountains. New York: Random House, 2003. P
Kraft, Heidi. Rule Number Two: Lessons I Learned in a Combat Hospital. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2012. P
Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1992, 1980. Pt
Lown, Bernard. The Lost Art of Healing. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. P
Montross, Christine. Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab. New York: Penguin Press, 2007. P
Montross, Christine. Falling into the Fire: A Psychiatrist’s Encounters with the Mind in Crisis. New York: Penguin Press, 2013. P
Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. New York: Scribner, 2010. P
Murray, John. Intensive Care: A Doctor’s Journal. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. P
Nolen, William. The Making of a Surgeon. New York, Random House 1970. B
Nuland, Sherwin. How We Die. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Pt
Nuland, Sherwin. The Soul of Medicine: Tales from the Bedside. New York: Kaplan Pub., 2009. P
Ofri, Danielle. The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review. New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2008. P, Pt
Ofri, Danielle. Incidental Findings: Lessons from My Patients in the Art of Medicine. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005. D, P
Ofri, Danielle. Medicine in Translation: Journeys With My Patients. Boston: Beacon Press, 2009. D, P
Ofri, Danielle. Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. B, D
Pausch, Randy. The Last Lecture. New York: Hyperion, 2008.
Price, Reynolds. A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing. New York: Scribner, 2003. Pt
Quill, Timothy. Death and Dignity: Making Choices and Taking Charge. New York: WW Norton, 1993. P
Quinones-Hinojosa, Alfredo. Becoming Dr. Q: My Journey from Migrant Farm Worker to Brain Surgeon. University of California Press, 2011. P
Radner, Gilda. It's Always Something. New York: Avon Books, 1996. Pt
Remen, Rachel Naomi. Kitchen Table Wisdom. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996. P, Pt
Remen, Rachel Naomi. My Grandfather’s Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging. New York: Riverhead Books, 2000. P, Pt
Sacks, Oliver. A Leg to Stand On. New York: Perennial Library, 1987. P, Pt
Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. New York: Summit Books, 1985.
Sanders, Lisa. Every Patient Tells a Story. New York: Broadway Books, 2009. P
Schweitzer, Albert. Out of My Life and Thought. New York: The New American Library, 1949. P
Servan-Schreiber, David. Anti-Cancer, A New Way of Life. Carlton North, Vic.: Scribe Publications, 2010. Pt
Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown Publishers, 2010.
Spiro, Howard. The Power of Hope: A Doctor’s Perspective. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. P
Sweet, Victoria. God’s Hotel: A Doctor, A Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine. New York: Riverhead Books, 2012. P
Sweet, Victoria. Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2018. P
Taylor, Jill Bolte. My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey. New York: Viking, 2008. Pt
Thernstrom, Melanie. The Pain Chronicles. 2010, P, Pt
Thomas, Lewis. The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher. New York: Viking Press, 1983. P
Verghese, Abraham. My Own Country. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. P, Pt
Verghese, Abraham. The Tennis Partner: A Doctor's Story of Friendship and Loss. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1998.
Zazove, Philip. When the Phone Rings, My Bed Shakes: Memoirs of a Deaf Doctor. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1993. P
Brownlee, Shannon. Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making us Sicker and Poorer. New York: Bloomsbury, USA, 2007.
Cohn, Jonathan. Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis – and the People who Pay the Price. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007.
Rosen, George. A History of Public Health. New York: MD Publications, 1958.
Starr, Paul. The Social Transformation of American Medicine. New York: Basic Books, 1982.
Davidson, Richard, and Sharon Begley. The Emotional Life of Your Brain. New York: Hudson Street Press, 2012.
De Kruif, Paul. Microbe Hunters. New York, Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1926.
Judson, Horace Freeland. The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.
Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. New York: Scribner, 2010.
Nesse, Randolph, and George Williams. Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine. New York: Times Books, 1994.
Roach, Mary. Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008.
Roach, Mary. Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.
Roach, Mary. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003.
Thomas, Lewis. The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine Watcher. New York: Viking Press, 1983.
Catanzaro, Thomas. Promoting the Human-Animal Bond in Veterinary Practice. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2001.
Available at NDSU.
Herriot, James, All Creatures Great and Small. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1973.
Herriot, James, All Things Wise and Wonderful. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1977.
Herriot, James, The Lord God Made Them All. New York: Bantam Books, 1982.
Herriot, James. All Things Bright and Beautiful. ONT: Collier-Macmillan, 1974.
Karesh, William. Appointment at the Ends of the World. New York: Warner Books, 1999.