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These recommended readings are all available at the ACPHS Library! Come check them out!
References in ACPHS Library
Handbook of Religion and Health by Harold G. Koenig; Dana E. King; Verna Benner Carson
Call Number: W 61 K636 2012 ALB REF
ISBN: 9780195335958
Publication Date: 2012-02-29
This seminal text reviews research on the connections between religion and both mental and physical health, and develops a model to explain how religious involvement may impact physical health through mind-body mechanisms.
Imagine What It's Like by Ruth L. Nadelhaft; Victoria Bonebakker
Medicine, Literature and Eponyms by A. E. Rodin; Jack Key
Call Number: REF W 13 R625 1989
ISBN: 0894642774
Publication Date: 1989-08-01
An encyclopedia of over 350 medical conditions whose names are derived from myth, fable, religious scripture, literary prose, poetry, and art. Includes explanations of the names and extensive references.
Narrative Medicine by Rita Charon
Call Number: W 62 C527 2006
ISBN: 9780195166750
Publication Date: 2006-03-02
Narrative medicine is a relatively new practice in Western medicine that employs patients telling their stories of illness as a component to physical healing. This is a comprehensive and systematic introduction to the conceptual principles underlying narrative medicine, as well as a practical guide for implementing narrative methods in health care.
A survey of the history of Western thought and culture, presented through 700 alphabetically arranged entries that explore the origin, cultural interpretations, and historical themes of art, philosophy, science, religion--and their many intersections.
Recommended Readings
Being Mortal by Atul Gawande
Call Number: WB 310 G282 2014
ISBN: 0805095152
Publication Date: 2014-10-07
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 injury and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering. Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession’s ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. "Being Mortal" asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end.
Darkness Visible by William Styron
Call Number: WM 171 S797 2007
ISBN: 0679643524
Publication Date: 2007-01-23
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time A work of great personal courage and a literary tour de force, this bestseller is Styron's true account of his descent into a crippling and almost suicidal depression. Styron is perhaps the first writer to convey the full terror of depression's psychic landscape, as well as the illuminating path to recovery.
"The Death of Ivan Ilych" in The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy
Call Number: PG 3366 .A13 1993
ISBN: 0486278050
Publication Date: 1993-10-13
One of the world's greatest novelists, Leo Tolstoy also wrote numerous excellent short stories. In "The Death of Ivan Ilych" (1886), a symbolic Everyman discovers the inner light of faith and love only when confronted by death.
The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Call Number: WH 11 AA1 M843 2010
ISBN: 1439170916
Publication Date: 2011-08-09
The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years.
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
Call Number: WM 100 K297 1994
ISBN: 0679746048
Publication Date: 1994-04-19
In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years in the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele--Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles--as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary. Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Call Number: W 50 S566 2011
ISBN: 1400052181
Publication Date: 2011-03-08
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor, black tobacco farmer whose cells--taken without her knowledge in 1951--became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, and more. Henrietta's cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can't afford health insurance. This book tells the riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of scientific discovery and faith healing; and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew.
Intoxicated by My Illness by Anatole Broyard
Call Number: QZ 201 B769 1993
ISBN: 0449908348
Publication Date: 1993-06-01
"Succeeds brilliantly....He lives as a writer and we are the wealthier for it." THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD Anatyole Broyad, long-time book critic, book review editor, and essayist for THE NEW YORK TIMES wants to be remembered. He will be, with this collection of irreverent, humorous essays he wrote concerning the ordeals of life and death--many of which were written during the battle with cancer that led to his death in 1990. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
A Life in Medicine by Robert Coles (Editor); Randy Testa (Editor); Joseph O'Donnell (Editor); Penny Armstrong (Editor); M. Brownell Anderson (Editor)
Call Number: WZ 330 L533 2002
ISBN: 1565848497
Publication Date: 2003-09-01
A Life in Medicine collects stories, poems, and essays by and for those in the healing profession, who are struggling to keep up with the science while staying true to the humanitarian goals at the heart of their work. Organized around the central themes of altruism, knowledge, skill, and duty, the book includes contributions from well-known authors, doctors, nurses, practitioners, and patients. Provocative and moving pieces address what it means to care for a life in a century of unprecedented scientific advances, examining issues of hope and healing from both ends of the stethoscope.
My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor
Call Number: WL 355 T294 2009
ISBN: 0452295548
Publication Date: 2009-05-26
On December 10, 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor, a thirty-seven- year-old Harvard-trained brain scientist experienced a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. As she observed her mind deteriorate to the point that she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life-all within four hours-Taylor alternated between the euphoria of the intuitive and kinesthetic right brain, in which she felt a sense of complete well-being and peace, and the logical, sequential left brain, which recognized she was having a stroke and enabled her to seek help before she was completely lost. It would take her eight years to fully recover. For Taylor, her stroke was a blessing and a revelation. It taught her that by "stepping to the right" of our left brains, we can uncover feelings of well-being that are often sidelined by "brain chatter." Taylor provides a valuable recovery guide for those touched by brain injury and an inspiring testimony that inner peace is accessible to anyone.
Somebody up There Hates You by Hollis Seamon
ISBN: 1616204540
Publication Date: 2014-09-02
"Chemo, radiation, a zillion surgeries, watching my mom age twenty years in twenty months . . . if that's part of the Big Dude's plan, then it's pretty obvious, isn't it? Enough said." Smart-mouthed and funny, sometimes raunchy, Richard Casey is in most ways a typical seventeen-year-old boy. Except Richie has cancer, and he's spending his final days in a hospice unit. In this place where people go to die, Richie has plans to make the most of the life he has left. Sylvie, the only other hospice inmate under sixty, has a few plans of her own for Richie. What begins as camaraderie quickly blossoms into real love, and this star-crossed pair is determined to live on their own terms, in whatever time remains.
Voluntary Madness by Norah Vincent
Call Number: WM 40 V562 2009
ISBN: 0143116851
Publication Date: 2009-12-29
"Voluntary Madness" is a controversial work that unveils the state of mental healthcare in the United States from the inside out. At the conclusion of her celebrated first book ("Self-Made Man" in which she spent eighteen months disguised as a man) Norah Vincent found herself emotionally drained and severely depressed. Determined but uncertain about maintaining her own equilibrium, she boldly committed herself to three different facilities-a big-city hospital, a private clinic in the Midwest, and finally an upscale retreat in the South. Voluntary Madness is the chronicle of Vincent's journey through the world of the mentally ill as she struggles to find her own health and happiness.
Wit by Margaret Edson; M. Edson
Call Number: WP 322 E376 1999
ISBN: 0571198775
Publication Date: 1999-03-29
Margaret Edson's powerfully imagined Pulitzer Prize-winning play examines what makes life worth living through her exploration of one of existence's unifying experiences--mortality--while she also probes the vital importance of human relationships. Edson delves into timeless questions with no final answers: How should we live our lives knowing that we will die? Is the way we live our lives and interact with others more important than what we achieve materially, professionally, or intellectually? How does language figure into our lives? Can science and art help us conquer death, or our fear of it? What will seem most important to each of us about life as that life comes to an end?