Seven medical memoirs for aspiring doctors

Robert Meyer, MD has been an emergency room doctor for over twenty-five years, spending most of his career at the Bronx’s Montefiore Medical Center, whose emergency rooms are New York City’s most visited, and among the nation’s five busiest. He is as well an associate professor of emergency medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Dan Koeppel is a former executive editor at The New York Times’s Wirecutter. He has written for national publications including Wired, Outside, National Geographic, and The Atlantic and has won a James Beard Award for his food writing. Koeppel is also a recipient of a National Geographic Expeditions Grant. His screenwriting credits include Star Trek: The Next Generation, and he is the author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World.

Meyer and Koeppel are the co-authors of Every Minute Is a Day: A Doctor, an Emergency Room, and a City Under Siege.

At Lit Hub they tagged seven books every aspiring doctor should read, including:

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2011 history of cancer was a book I first read just after it came out, when a relative of mine was struggling with the disease. The history of the affliction, and humanity’s attempts to understand, fight, and cure it, are epic, inspiring, and grandiose. This was personally reinforced to me as I underwent my own unexpected cancer battle during the writing of Every Minute Is a Day.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Emperor of All Maladies is among Adam Kay's five best books about living with cancer.

--Marshal Zeringue