4 non-fiction medical books for your summer reading list

This New York Times bestseller chronicles the work of Henry Marsh, CBEM FRCS, one of Britain’s most esteemed neurosurgeons, who has decades of experience operating on the human brain. In Do No Harm, Marsh recounts the highs and lows from his experiences at the operating table—some of which took over 10 hours to complete.

For neurosurgeons, a simple mistake could be the difference between improving a patient’s health and causing serious damage. In addition to discussing the weight of the responsibility shouldered by neurosurgeons, Do No Harm offers a unique window into the organ that Marsh describes as being “as great as the stars at night.”

This book “gets into the humanity of what we do, and how we handle the outcomes when they aren’t what we were hoping for,” said pediatric neurosurgeon Krystal Tomei, MD, MPH, in an AMA article.

Read Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery, by Henry Marsh

How Doctors Think is Jerome Groopman, MD’s examination of doctors’ thought processes and cognitive habits—as well as their possible hidden biases.

This book compels its audience to come to terms with the evidence-based ideology that doctors’ influences will inevitably shape the decisions they make, which lead them to make errors down the road.

“Recognizing cognitive biases and knowing how they can impact our work as doctors makes us less likely to become trapped by them, and might expand our capacity for creative and thorough problem solving, which is essential for the good practice of medicine,” Brian Schnipke, MD, wrote about How Doctors Think in an Op-Med article detailing his reading recommendations.

Read How Doctors Think, by Jerome Groopman

For those who are interested in zooming out on the healthcare system and learning about historical inequities, this is the book for you.

In The Power to Heal, Smith focuses on Black medical leaders whose work largely informed the civil rights movement. These leaders fought to abolish what grew from the seeds of Jim Crow’s “separate but equal” mentality regarding Black people in the US, which many hospitals at times tried to uphold.

Medicare is a major player in this book, as well as the transformational actions taken by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and Black civil rights activists to ensure a more equitable future for all citizens—even if doing so meant tampering with US domestic policies.

Pediatrician Nusheen Ameenuddin, MD, MPH, MPA, recommended this book in the aforementioned AMA article “because it shows how important and effective federal policy can be in closing gaps and inequities.”

Read The Power to Heal: Civil Rights, Medicare and the Struggle to Transform America’s Health Care System, by David Barton Smith

The First Cell is a critical, curious look at the more than 20 new cancer medications to surface in 2020 alone.

Azra Raza, MD, a cancer researcher and physician at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, questions the decision to pour medical and financial resources into medications that do very little to add to the quality—or quantity—of patients’ lives.

These questions aren’t solely from a researcher’s perspective, either, according to an article published by the AAMC.

Raza lost her husband 2 decades ago to leukemia. She was his oncologist while he was undergoing treatment, an experience that provided her an intimate understanding of what patients with incurable cancer endure.

In The First Cell, Raza fights for a preventive approach to cancer care—including early detection and treatment—while painting a very honest picture of what traditional cancer treatment can look like.

Read The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, by Azra Raza