Books for doctorlings

[liv]

So the medical school is having a drive to encourage students to engage more with arts and humanities, so we don't end up with a lot of future doctors who haven't read a novel since they finished GCSE English. And they're asking for suggestions for books worth recommending to the students.

This seems like an interesting question, so I'm throwing it open to you: if you could recommend one book you'd like your doctor to have read, what would it be? They specify that it doesn't have to be about a directly medical topic, but just something that could help very science-specialized people to understand more about being human. Non-fiction is ok but they want literary non-fiction, things like biographies, rather than textbooks.

My thinking about this is that there's no point recommending the obvious nineteenth century Dead White Men classics, because even if the students were funnelled out of anything to do with literature in their mid teens they're all high achievers, they've almost certainly all "done" Dickens for GCSE and got As for their essays. And even the ones who don't read have read The man who mistook his wife for a hat because various how to get into medical school guides push it as something to mention at interview.

So, suggestions?

Comments

[vatine]

There's a few of interesting SF "military hospital in space" books. But now that I'm trying to recall titles, they all escape me. :(

I don't think this is the series and I must confess to not really having read them for, what, 20 years. But, that may not be a bad starting point.

[liv]

That sounds quite interesting, and I think the idea of having to treat literal aliens might be helpful in developing approaches for dealing with patients from amazingly different backgrounds.

[kaberett]

Dia Reeves Slice of Cherry, tbh, or maybe even Scalzi's Lock In. Both feature protags with chronic illnesses as your PoV character and are handled well; both encourage the reader to think about race and language and how brains work and to treat people with illnesses as human. And yeah they're maybe YA, but... whatever? And Lock In features a protag who is never gendered, of course.

[davidgillon]

The other good point with Lock In is that it looks at how society others disabled people, and explicitly addresses disablism ranging from petty attitudinal issues, through delibrate access discrimination and on up to physical assault. I'm not convinced many of the doctors and other medics I've dealt with have the first clue about this aspect of disability.

For non-fiction (and this is a rec for everyone, not just the baby-docs), Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People, Katharine Quarmby - which starts with a survey of historical attitudes to disability in the UK, but then specifically focuses on contemporary disability hate crime.

[seekingferret]

Fred Pohl's Man Plus strikes me as an interesting possibility. It's about a man surgically modified to live on Mars, and it focuses a good deal on the medical aspects- the experience of undergoing the actual procedures, the subsequent adjustments to his new body, the feelings of isolation and distinction from other people.

This list, which was recced at Loncon, might also be a good place to look for ideas: http://www.lablit.com/the_list

[liv]

That's a thought, isn't it, an exploration of surgery and going on with your life after that, that's something that doesn't get talked about a lot.

As for the lablit list, I'm a fan of Rohn and I admire her project, but I'm not sure that fiction that gives a realistic idea of scientific research is what our med students most need. They do get exposed to quite a lot of actual scientific research, and we're working on increasing that, so it feels less of a gap than empathizing with people who aren't scientists at all, in their lives outside coming to the doctor with symptoms.

[yvi]

"They specify that it doesn't have to be about a directly medical topic, but just something that could help very science-specialized people to understand more about being human."

Wow. That, um, really doesn't sound all that nice at all. Is that how they phrase it?

[liv]

Let me dig up the exact wording, here we go: they're seeking books that may encourage our medical students to read, explore the human condition, enrich their professional and personal lives. I possibly shouldn't have paraphrased explore the human condition as understand more about being human, but to me they mean much the same thing.

[silveradept]

I might recommend the Newsflesh trilogy, by Mira Grant - there's lots of did the research involved, but they can also get an idea of what a society in quarantine does, as well as how people behave knowing they have an infectious disease that could kill them at any point.

[oursin]

You might try the Wellcome Trust Book Prize winners/short lists? (Few of which I have read myself.) Because I don't suppose it's worth saying MIDDLEMARCH!?

[hilarita]

Pratchett's Small Gods, or one of the Tiffany Aching series, if you want people learning how to be people really hard. Also, Tiffany Aching books come with a really strong line in 'and do not patronise people', which I can't help but feel is good for proto-medics.

[lovingboth]

Yes.

[spaceoperadiva]

I Heard the Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven. A young vicar is assigned to a remote aboriginal village in British Columbia in the early/mid-twentieth century. It's a story about living a calling, and learning to deal with life, love, and death.

[emperor]

Wit? Or will they all have discussed it with you already?

Stand on Zanzibar?

[samskeyti]

Rebecca Goss "Her Birth". Her website discusses a reading she gave to med students recently. Frank Huyler " The Blood of Strangers", Jason Shinder "Stupid Hope" and the short stories by Chris Adrian. Adrian and Huyler are medics and Shinder was a cancer patient. These books are all short and intense, so you will get engagement from the time-pressured.

There's an anthology edited by Lavinia Greenlaw on medical and body related poems. I got a copy from the Wellcome shop, can't recall the title.

Danielle Ofri at Bellevue NY would be a great contact person. I can give you more ideas later, if you want. (Kind of my field, or one of them.)

[green_knight]

Terry Pratchett is the obvious recommendation; the usual suspects for people who *do* read occasionally, and Science of Discworld for people who aren't much into fiction.

[chickenfeet]

I'm going to suggest John LeCarré; particularly the recent stuff. Assuming most of your med students are going to end up in the NHS they need to understand how deep bureaucracies actually work and the choices they impose on people who work within them. LeCarré is accurate and truly scary.

[davidgillon]

If we want to teach them about bureaucracies, and especially ones with quality systems, then Charles Stross's Laundry series fits the bill rather nicely and comes complete with innovative new disease mechanisms, such as Krantzberg Syndrome, which manifests Alzheimer's-like in agents whose brains have been transdimensionally nibbled on while summoning things man was not meant to know.

[boxofdelights]

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. Nonfiction about the life of the woman whose cancer created the HeLa cell line, and her family. Has interesting things to say about how doctors treat patients, how researchers treat subjects, who owns intellectual property and why, and racism in America.

[khalinche]

Heartily seconded.

[wychwood]

Elizabeth Moon's Speed of Dark has an autistic protagonist and really addresses the idea of whether "curing" autism is something people should try for, and pros and cons of being non-neurotypical. Might be a good one?

[rysmiel]

I was going to recommend this one, it's a very good POV and characterisation and it's thoughtful and thought-provoking about an angle of thing I would hope doctorlings should be considering but can see that they might not, necessarily.

[naath]

Well, I think the Just City does a good take-down of Plato's assumption that humans don't have to be all... messy, and human. It just comes to mind having so recently read it.

I've been watching Call the Midwife (it's based on a book I haven't read) which is all about the more... human... side of health care.

Ursula Le Guin's many novels always seem to have a lot to say about the human condition.

PTerry is genius at playing with story-tropes to great effect (although I worry that one has to have read more of the things that play them straight to "get" it? I don't know. I'd start with Tiffany anyway, Tiffany is great. Even if the books are YA. Means it's easy and quick to read).

[syderia]

I would recommend the Ancillary series, by Ann Leckie, for the ethics questions asked in the subtext and its exploration of just how far people under duress are willing to go (and the question about what constitutes a person, while we're at it.
Also, We were liars (which if I remember correctly is technically YA), by e. lockhart, for a first-person vision of what it means to live with a disability, for the look on privilege, and for the mystery at the heart of it.

[altamira16]

Contortionist's Handbook by Craig Clevenger. Here is a review of that one.

What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine by Danielle Ofri. Here is a book review of that one.

[ajollypyruvate]

I will never stop recommending George Orwell's essays. Never!

I mostly read SF/Fantasy, so for my One Book, I'll recommend The Three-Body Problem, because it is science-y and also deals quite a bit with human relations. Also, it's not from the Western Perspective, so that's a bonus. Also, too, it's very good.

[shehasathree]

*following with interest*

Non-fiction:
The Patient from Hell, Stephen H. Schneider
At the Will of the Body and The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank
The Culture of Pain, David B. Morris

[siderea]

There's actually a standard answer to this, and I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. I haven't read it myself, but I understand a lot of medical programs assign it to their students.

In non-fiction about doctoring, I am a big fan of Atul Gawande. He writes essays about medicine and being a doctor. He's got several anthologies out: Better and Complications come to mind. Have I mentioned his "The Score" to you? Surely I must have. It is one of the best things I have ever read.

In fiction, I'd vote for The Diamond Age. One of the things that I think is most psychosocially challenging for young clinicians is that they largely come out of an upper middle class, white collar/professional milieu, and one of the privileges of that social caste is not having to take jobs that expose you to the General Public. I don't expect most of your doctorlings have ever worked retail, e.g. Well, the thing about being a doctor is, hoo boy, do you get to meet the full panoply of the human race. There can be culture shock, not just in the sense "hey, there are people with other cultures", but in the interesting and more shaking sense, "my culture is other than I was always lead to believe." Of all the things I've read, I feel The Diamond Age has the most useful meditations on cultural diversity for those going through that experience.

[princess]

Joan Didion's "Year of Magical Thinking" which is about the first year after her husband died (and is ended with the death of her daughter, if I recall, about whom a second book, Blue Nights was written). It comforted me through grieving the loss of a parent, and I think it humanizes the grief of those left behind in such a visceral way.

And Didion is an essayist and chronicler of human nature, so I think she meets all the needs. :)

[lavendersparkle]

I didn't think that I could contribute anything as I'm not much of a reader, but I'll suggest The Book of Strange New Things by Michael Faber. It's set in the near future and the main character is an evangelical Christian who is recruited to be the pastor to a group of aliens on a distant planet. One of the interesting aspects of it from a doctorling perspective is that the aliens lack the ability to heal, so it explores what it's like to be a human that is capable of healing. It explores issues of love, faith and the human condition. It might also be of interest because Faber is an atheist who misses having a faith and his wife was diagnosed and died of cancer over the course of his writing the book, so he's doing a lot of thinking about love and faith and disease on the page.

[flippac]

I'm tempted to recommend Seanan McGuire's Velveteen stories (now available as two books) - they're light reads but deal with a world where superheroes are "recruited" as children and managed by a large company with a monopoly, a political agenda and a tendency to do abusive things. I suspect it does fairly well at explaining the basics of why some people don't have a good "support network", can't talk effectively etc etc and why throwing more power at the situation is a Bad Idea.

It's also pretty open about which parts are outright fantasy, and doesn't have eg X-Men's obsession with "how much can we make Wolverine hurt this time?". Light enough for people who don't get it to understand what's there without thinking they now understand everything, if that makes sense.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

I've just finished The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer, and I think it does a good job of portraying its protagonist as an ordinary human being who happens to be schizophrenic, rather than focussing on the schizophrenia. But I don't (know that I) know anyone who is schizophrenic, so I could be way off in that description.

(Also, the Henrietta Lacks book is really good.)

[jack]

"Accessible books with doctors as protagonists" gives Michael Crighton's Case of Need which is very hospital-detailed and gives a good description of how it sucked when abortion wasn't legally available. And Ethan of Athos which despite being science fiction, has interesting world-building that doesn't require a lot of familiarity with genre tropes.

But, I'm not sure either of those is actually the most useful for them to read, but I'm not what _would_ be.