Download or read book How Death Becomes Life written by Joshua Mezrich and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully written and compelling memoir of a largely unexplored area of medicine: transplant surgery. Leading transplant surgeon Dr Joshua Mezrich creates life from loss, moving organs from one body to another. In this intimate, profoundly moving work, he examines more than one hundred years of remarkable medical breakthroughs, connecting this fascinating history with the stories of his own patients. Gripping and evocative, How Death Becomes Life takes us inside the operating room and presents the stark dilemmas that transplant surgeons must face daily: How much risk should a healthy person be allowed to take to save someone she loves? Should a patient suffering from alcoholism receive a healthy liver? The human story behind the most exceptional medicine of our time, Mezrich's riveting book is a poignant reminder that a life lost can also offer the hope of a new beginning.
Download or read book When Breath Becomes Air written by Paul Kalanithi and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-02-04 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **THE MILLION COPY BESTSELLER** 'Rattling. Heartbreaking. Beautiful,' Atul Gawande, bestselling author of Being Mortal What makes life worth living in the face of death? At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity - the brain - and finally into a patient and a new father. Paul Kalanithi died while working on this profoundly moving book, yet his words live on as a guide to us all. When Breath Becomes Air is a life-affirming reflection on facing our mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both. 'A vital book about dying. Awe-inspiring and exquisite. Obligatory reading for the living' Nigella Lawson
Download or read book The Anticipatory Corpse written by Jeffrey P. Bishop and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2011-09-19 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this original and compelling book, Jeffrey P. Bishop, a philosopher, ethicist, and physician, argues that something has gone sadly amiss in the care of the dying by contemporary medicine and in our social and political views of death, as shaped by our scientific successes and ongoing debates about euthanasia and the “right to die”—or to live. The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying, informed by Foucault’s genealogy of medicine and power as well as by a thorough grasp of current medical practices and medical ethics, argues that a view of people as machines in motion—people as, in effect, temporarily animated corpses with interchangeable parts—has become epistemologically normative for medicine. The dead body is subtly anticipated in our practices of exercising control over the suffering person, whether through technological mastery in the intensive care unit or through the impersonal, quasi-scientific assessments of psychological and spiritual “medicine.” The result is a kind of nihilistic attitude toward the dying, and troubling contradictions and absurdities in our practices. Wide-ranging in its examples, from organ donation rules in the United States, to ICU medicine, to “spiritual surveys,” to presidential bioethics commissions attempting to define death, and to high-profile cases such as Terri Schiavo’s, The Anticipatory Corpse explores the historical, political, and philosophical underpinnings of our care of the dying and, finally, the possibilities of change. This book is a ground-breaking work in bioethics. It will provoke thought and argument for all those engaged in medicine, philosophy, theology, and health policy.
Download or read book Death Becomes Us written by Pamela Skjolsvik and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2015-12-02 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Almost everyone with a pulse fears death, but not everyone fears life. With crippling social anxiety, I feared both. But after an accidental call to a funeral home during my mid-life crisis trip to grad school, I reluctantly embarked on a journey to explore professions that dealt with death in order to come to terms with my own mortality. (From cover).
Download or read book Last Night in the OR written by Bud Shaw and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For readers of Henry Marsh's Do No Harm, Paul A. Ruggieri's Confessions of a Surgeon, and Atul Gawande's Better, a pioneering surgeon shares memories from a life in one of surgery’s most demanding fields The 1980s marked a revolution in the field of organ transplants, and Bud Shaw, M.D., who studied under Tom Starzl in Pittsburgh, was on the front lines. Now retired from active practice, Dr. Shaw relays gripping moments of anguish and elation, frustration and reward, despair and hope in his struggle to save patients. He reveals harshly intimate moments of his medical career: telling a patient's husband that his wife has died during surgery; struggling to complete a twenty-hour operation as mental and physical exhaustion inch closer and closer; and flying to retrieve a donor organ while the patient waits in the operating room. Within these more emotionally charged vignettes are quieter ones, too, like growing up in rural Ohio, and being awakened late at night by footsteps in the hall as his father, also a surgeon, slipped out of the house to attend to a patient in the ER. In the tradition of Mary Roach, Jerome Groopman, Eric Topol, and Atul Gawande, Last Night in the OR is an exhilarating, fast-paced, and beautifully written memoir, one that will captivate readers with its courage, intimacy, and honesty.
Download or read book The Bright Hour written by Nina Riggs and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Built on her ... Modern Love column, 'When a Couch is More Than a Couch' (9/23/2016), a ... memoir of living meaningfully with 'death in the room' by the 38-year-old great-great-great granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson--mother to two young boys, wife of 16 years--after her terminal cancer diagnosis"--
Download or read book Estimation of the Time Since Death written by Burkhard Madea and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Estimation of the Time Since Death remains the foremost authoritative book on scientifically calculating the estimated time of death postmortem. Building on the success of previous editions which covered the early postmortem period, this new edition also covers the later postmortem period including putrefactive changes, entomology, and postmortem r
Download or read book Exhale written by David Weill MD and published by Post Hill Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young father with a rare form of lung cancer who has been turned down for a transplant by several hospitals. A kid who was considered not “smart enough” to be worthy of a transplant. A young mother dying on the waiting list in front of her two small children. A father losing his oldest daughter after a transplant goes awry. The nights waiting for donor lungs to become available, understanding that someone needed to die so that another patient could live. These are some of the stories in Exhale, a memoir about Dr. Weill’s ten years spent directing the lung transplant program at Stanford. Through these stories, he shows not only the miracle of transplantation, but also how it is a very human endeavor performed by people with strengths and weaknesses, powerful attributes, and profound flaws. Exhale is an inside look at the world of high-stakes medicine, complete with the decisions that are confronted, the mistakes that are made, and the story of a transplant doctor’s slow recognition that he needed to step away from the front lines. This book is an exploration of holding on too tight, of losing one’s way, and of the power of another kind of decision—to leave behind everything for a fresh start.
Download or read book Being Mortal written by Atul Gawande and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 New York Times Bestseller In Being Mortal, bestselling 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. 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. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified. Full of eye-opening research and riveting storytelling, 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.
Download or read book Borrowing Life written by Shelley Fraser Mickle and published by Charlesbridge Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against a global backdrop of wartime suffering and postwar hope, Borrowing Life gathers the personal histories of the men and women behind the team that enabled and performed the modern medical miracle of the world's first successful organ transplant. "An extraordinary work. Shelley Fraser Mickle has not only provided a detailed, fascinating documentation of the world's first successful organ transplant, but she has also painted the lives of those involved--doctors, patients, family members--so vividly that the reader is completely enthralled and emotionally invested in their grieved losses as well as their successes. The result is a beautiful tribute to medical science as well as to humanity." Jill McCorkle, NYT bestselling author of Life After Life "Working with Dr. Moore, Dr. Murray and Dr, Vandam to create the painting commemorating their historic operation and the research leading up to it was the greatest adventure of my artistic career. Having my painting on the cover of Borrowing Life renews that excitement, for I know what grand adventure is waiting for the reader." Joel Babb, artist "I was so very pleased to be involved with Shelley as she wrote her captivating, compelling book. I only wish that Ron could be here with me to read it." Cynthia Herrick, wife of the first successful organ transplant donor "Had these men and women not worked diligently to save the life of Charles Woods, I and my 5 brothers and 3 sisters, would not have been born. Charles Woods and Miriam Woods are my parents. It is thrilling to read Ms Mickle's book as it closely mirrors the stories our dad and mom shared with us as children. The amazing thing is that as a disfigured war hero, our dad embraced his appearance as a badge of honor." David Woods Performed at Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in 1954, the first successful kidney transplant was the culmination of years of grit, compassion, and the pursuit of excellence by a remarkable medical team--Nobel Prize-winning surgeon Joseph Murray, his boss and fellow surgeon Francis Moore, and British scientist and fellow Nobel laureate Peter Medawar. Drawing on the lives of these members of the Greatest Generation, Borrowing Life creates a compelling narrative that begins in wartime and tracks decades of the ups and downs, personal and professional, of these inspiring men and their achievements, which continue to benefit humankind in so many ways.
Download or read book And a Time to Die written by Sharon Kaufman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2005-04-19 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most Americans, when pressed, have a vague sense of how they would like to die. They may imagine a quick and painless end or a gentle passing away during sleep. Some may wish for time to prepare and make peace with themselves, their friends, and their families. Others would prefer not to know what's coming, a swift, clean break. Yet all fear that the reality will be painful and prolonged; all fear the loss of control that could accompany dying. That fear is justified. It is also historically unprecedented. In the past thirty years, the advent of medical technology capable of sustaining life without restoring health, the expectation that a critically ill person need not die, and the conviction that medicine should routinely thwart death have significantly changed where, when, and how Americans die and put us all in the position of doing something about death. In a penetrating and revelatory study, medical anthropologist Sharon R. Kaufman examines the powerful center of those changes -- the hospital, where most Americans die today. In the hospital world, the deep, irresolvable tension between the urge to extend life at all costs and the desire to allow "letting go" is rarely acknowledged, yet it underlies everything that happens there among patients, families, and health professionals. Over the course of two years, Kaufman observed and interviewed critically ill patients, their families, doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff at three community hospitals. In...And a Time to Die, her research places us at the heart of that science-driven yet fractured and often irrational world of health care delivery, where empathetic yet frustrated, hard-working yet constrained professionals both respond to and create the anxieties and often inchoate expectations of patients and families, who must make "decisions" they are ill-prepared to make. Filled with actual conversations between patients and doctors, families and hospital staff,...And a Time to Die clearly and carefully exposes the reasons for complicated questions about medical care at the end of life: for example, why "heroic" treatment so often overrides "humane" care; why patients and families are ambivalent about choosing death though they claim to want control; what constitutes quality of life and life itself; and, ultimately, why a "good" death is so elusive. In elegant, compelling prose, Kaufman links the experiences of patients and families, the work of hospital staff, and the ramifications of institutional bureaucracy to show the invisible power of the hospital system itself -- its rules, mandates, and daily activity -- in shaping death and our individual experience of it. ...And a Time to Die is a provocative, illuminating, and necessary read for anyone working in or navigating the health care system today, providing a much-needed road map to the disorienting territory of the hospital, where we all are asked to make life-and-death choices.
Download or read book The Gift of Life written by Traci Graf and published by Firefly Books. This book was released on 2014-06-02 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Organ transplants are a very controversial and unique area of medicine. Those of us who work as Transplant Coordinators were frequently referred to by hospital staff as 'organ vultures' behind our backs, but also many times within earshot. I felt this reference to extremely ugly birds was unfair and short sighted. I did say once in a while to a difficult staff person, 'if your kid needed a transplant wouldn't you hope that someone was out there being as ethically aggressive about finding an organ as they can?' That usually shut them up quickly." -- from the Foreword One of the miracles of modern medicine is the ability of surgeons to transplant organs. Often, it's the only way to save the life of a person whose own kidneys, lungs, liver or heart are failing. But with barely 2 percent of critically ill patients suitable for organ donation, the demand far exceeds the number of organs that become available. The Gift of Life is about the remarkable world of organ transplant coordinators, profiles of the men and women who locate and arrange for the donation of organs from those who are dying and wish to live on in others' bodies through this selfless gift. Traci Graf tells the riveting story of this unique and demanding branch of medicine. Transplant coordinators review the medical files and charts on all patients whose condition is so severe that they are not expected to live. Their task is to convince the patient (or the patient's family) to allow organs to be donated immediately upon death. The transplant coordinator works to saves lives by finding and obtaining consent for as many organ donations as possible. In The Gift of Life, transplant coordinator Traci Graf recounts the stress, drama and joy of working long hours dealing with emotionally distraught family members and overworked medical staff, and the emotional toll of a job that means the difference between life and death for the recipients. Packed with riveting first person narrative, The Gift of Life will appeal to anyone interested in modern medical practice and the lives and challenges faced by nurses and doctors who work to offer critically ill patients the gift of life thanks to donors' foresight and generosity.
Download or read book Spare Parts written by Paul Craddock and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul Craddock's Spare Parts offers an original look at the history of medicine itself through the rich, compelling, and delightfully macabre story of transplant surgery from ancient times to the present day. How did an architect help pioneer blood transfusion in the 1660's? Why did eighteenth-century dentists buy the live teeth of poor children? And what role did a sausage skin and an enamel bath play in making kidney transplants a reality? We think of transplant surgery as one of the medical wonders of the modern world. But transplant surgery is as ancient as the pyramids, with a history more surprising than we might expect. Paul Craddock takes us on a journey - from sixteenth-century skin grafting to contemporary stem cell transplants - uncovering stories of operations performed by unexpected people in unexpected places. Bringing together philosophy, science and cultural history, Spare Parts explores how transplant surgery constantly tested the boundaries between human, animal, and machine, and continues to do so today. Witty, entertaining, and illuminating, Spare Parts shows us that the history - and future - of transplant surgery is tied up with questions about not only who we are, but also what we are, and what we might become.
Download or read book Five Days at Memorial written by Sheri Fink and published by Crown. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The award-winning book that inspired an Apple Original series from Apple TV+ • A landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina—and the suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice—from a Pulitzer Prize–winning physician and reporter “An amazing tale, as inexorable as a Greek tragedy and as gripping as a whodunit.”—Dallas Morning News After Hurricane Katrina struck and power failed, amid rising floodwaters and heat, exhausted staff at Memorial Medical Center designated certain patients last for rescue. Months later, a doctor and two nurses were arrested and accused of injecting some of those patients with life-ending drugs. Five Days at Memorial, the culmination of six years of reporting by Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink, unspools the mystery, bringing us inside a hospital fighting for its life and into the most charged questions in health care: which patients should be prioritized, and can health care professionals ever be excused for hastening death? Transforming our understanding of human nature in crisis, Five Days at Memorial exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals how ill-prepared we are for large-scale disasters—and how we can do better. ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, Entertainment Weekly, Christian Science Monitor, Kansas City Star WINNER: National Book Critics Circle Award, J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Ridenhour Book Prize, American Medical Writers Association Medical Book Award, National Association of Science Writers Science in Society Award
Download or read book Open Heart written by Stephen Westaby and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2017-06-20 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In gripping prose, one of the world's leading cardiac surgeons lays bare both the wonder and the horror of a life spent a heartbeat away from death When Stephen Westaby witnessed a patient die on the table during open-heart surgery for the first time, he was struck by the quiet, determined way the surgeons walked away. As he soon understood, this detachment is a crucial survival strategy in a profession where death is only a heartbeat away. In Open Heart, Westaby reflects on over 11,000 surgeries, showing us why the procedures have never become routine and will never be. With astonishing compassion, he recounts harrowing and sometimes hopeful stories from his operating room: we meet a pulseless man who lives with an electric heart pump, an expecting mother who refuses surgery unless the doctors let her pregnancy reach full term, and a baby who gets a heart transplant-only to die once it's in place. For readers of Atul Gawande's Being Mortal and of Henry Marsh's Do No Harm, Open Heart offers a soul-baring account of a life spent in constant confrontation with death.
Download or read book Death Becomes Her written by Michael Anderle and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bethany Anne is tapped by the Patriarch to take over responsibility for the UnknownWorld, but with no experience or reputation, Bethany Anne takes everyone by surprise.
Download or read book Intimate Death written by Marie De Hennezel and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-06-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we learn to die? Most of us spend our lives avoiding that question, but this luminous book--a major best-seller in France--answers it with a directness and eloquence that are nothing less than transforming. As a psychologist in a hospital for the terminally ill in Paris, Marie de Hennezel has spent seven years tending to people who are relinquishing their hold on life. She tells the stories of her patients and their families. de Hennezel teaches us how to turn death--our loved ones' or our own--from something lonely and agonizing into a sacred passage. She discusses the importance of an honest reckoning, the value of ritual, the necessity of touch. In imparting these lessons, Intimate Death becomes a guide to living more fully, more intensely, than we had thought possible. "Unique...Of all the books I have read about the endings of our lives, this elegiac testimony has taught me the most."--Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D., author of How We Die "The quiet, obvious truths [de Hennezel] discovers in her work--these things have a kind of cumulative power."--Washington Post Book World From the Trade Paperback edition.
