Medical miracles, mysteries, and memoirs: 8 great summer reads about doctors and medicine

Learn how to avoid injuries that bring people to the emergency department. Get a firsthand account of surviving perinatal depression. Discover new ways to manage chronic pain. You'll find these topics and more in these recently published books by, for, and about doctors.

99 Ways to Die: And How to Avoid Them by Ashely Alker, MD

Alker is a funny person. She's also an emergency medicine doctor. Here she blends personality with profession, exploring ways people die or get seriously hurt, and describing how to avoid those fates. Those ways include infections, poison, drugs, animals, sex, the elements, and disease, often illuminated through cases she experienced in the emergency department. Alker conveys medical science and history in a breezy, comfortable tone sprinkled with metaphors, as if she were your favorite high school teacher. To explain the gradually increasing damage from hypertension, she opens with, "Is high blood pressure killing you? Yes, but probably not today." In a section about botulism, she notes of a pediatric case, "If you have ever tried to put tap dancing shoes on a rabid raccoon, you know what it's like to try to get oxygen on a 2-year-old." Alker doesn't poke fun at patients but tells lots of tales on herself: In opening a review of shark attacks, she confesses that she got her 5-year-old sister to stop joining her for swim practice by showing her the movie Jaws.

The Story of a Heart: Two Families, One Heart, and the Medical Miracle That Saved a Child's Life by Rachel Clarke, MD

A heart transplant is a miracle borne of sorrow, requiring one person to die in order to save another. One such miracle is recounted here with a deft mix of medical detail and compassion, told by a palliative doctor who traces the journey of a heart from a child who is killed to a child whose life depends on the organ's arrival. In 2017, 9-year-old Keira Ball suffered fatal brain injuries in a car accident in southwest England. Some 300 miles away, in northeast England, 9-year-old Max Johnson lay in the hospital facing death from dilated cardiomyopathy - a disease in which one or both ventricles dilates, restricting blood flow. Max had been on the waiting list for a donated heart for about 200 days. Keira's heart went to him. Clarke interweaves the story of the heart traveling cross-country with the broader history of transplant medicine, covering everything from tissue matching and immunosuppressants to ventilators and emergency trauma protocols. She follows the families as they meet, with Keira's mother listening to her daughter's heart beating in Max's chest.

A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future by Robert Wachter, MD

At a time when the breakneck advance of artificial intelligence (AI) stirs optimism and angst throughout the medical field, Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, weighs in as a cautious yet enthusiastic supporter. He acknowledges that some AI applications might be moving "too far, too fast" and that much of the technology comes loaded with risks, including errors, bias, and privacy violations. He contends that those risks can be mitigated through technological improvements and institutional practices, while the enormous gains that AI will bring to medical care demand that leaders embrace the integration of well-tested AI tools. He sees AI driving fundamental transformations, allowing physicians to increasingly supervise and coordinate care rather than perform every task (as AI takes on more of those), giving doctors more time to interact with patients.

Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity by Eric Topol, MD

In 2008, cardiologist Eric Topol, MD, led a study of 1,400 people who had reached ages 80 to 105 without major chronic disease, expecting to find that their genomes explained their healthy longevity. Instead, scientists concluded that the key was a mix of other factors that the participants shared, most notably lifestyle habits like physical activity and diet. Those findings informed Topol's future research - he's the founding director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute - and provide the basis for this book, which argues that the most realistic path to staying healthy deep into old age is through evidence-based lifestyle and clinical strategies. As for the latter, Topol pushes back against today's anti-science trend, touting measurable improvements in health brought on by advances in drugs, vaccines, AI-assisted analysis, and an array of monitoring and treatment tools. For physicians and medical students, the message is to focus on prevention through both lifestyle and medicine, and to use new technology only when its effectiveness is solidly backed by data.

Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer's Families and the Search for a Cure by Jennie Erin Smith

Starting in the 1980s, neurologist Francisco Lopera began riding horseback through the mountains of his home country, Colombia, to explore a medical mystery that had been debilitating and killing people for centuries. In certain villages, residents routinely began suffering severe memory loss before middle age, then dying in their 50s. Lopera discovered that a rare genetic mutation was causing early onset Alzheimer's disease. He set out to avert it. Jennie Erin Smith - an award-winning American science journalist and author - chronicles that work, following the neurologist, the families, and the research carried out in labs and through clinical trials. With the storytelling skills of a novelist, Smith shows in flesh and blood what happens when communities serve as sites for scientific investigation. The experiences are both uplifting and uncomfortable, raising questions about vulnerability, consent, and hope. For example: How do scientists communicate reality to villagers who excitedly sign up for the trials believing they will be cured? This was named among the best books of 2025 by The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal.

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green

Novelist and public health advocate John Green was touring a hospital in Sierra Leone - as part of a trip focused on global health and tuberculosis (TB) - when he met Henry, a patient with "spindly legs and a big, goofy smile," who suffered from drug-resistant TB. Green guessed the patient was 9 years old. Actually, he was 17, his growth having been stunted by the disease and malnutrition. Henry's story serves as the emotional spine of Green's book about TB. On the micro level, Green traces Henry's care from delayed diagnosis and a standard drug regimen to drug resistance and personalized treatment that saves the young man's life. On a broader scale, Green uses Henry's case and TB to explore health inequities, contending that this curable infection remains lethal largely because of poverty, weak health systems, and lack of access to diagnostics and therapy.

Persevered: A Maternal Health Memoir by Kara Zivin, PhD, MS

"The doctors say she's going to live." Those are the chilling opening words of Persevered, uttered by the author's husband to her mother as they stand beside the pregnant woman's hospital bed after she tried to kill herself with an overdose. Zivin wails, "I'm sorry!" That's how this mental health researcher draws readers into her struggle through depression and anxiety during and after her first pregnancy. She chronicles that journey via a mix of memoir and research, relying on memories, medical records, journal entries, and scientific writings. Her recollections are raw, as she captures the fear, guilt, and isolation that can accompany perinatal illness. But her story is also uplifting: She shows the strength it takes to ask for help, and finds a calling by helping other women who face similar struggles.

It Doesn't Have to Hurt: Your Smart Guide to a Pain-Free Life by Sanjay Gupta, MD

Twenty-four percent of adults in the United States (about 60 million people) suffer from chronic pain, according to federal estimates, but alleviating that pain remains one of the most vexing challenges for doctors. Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, addresses that challenge by framing chronic pain as a biopsychosocial problem that requires treatment options beyond drugs or medical procedures. Although the publisher promotes the book to a wide audience as a "smart guide to a pain-free life," it offers plenty of takeaways for physicians. Gupta is not anti-pharmaceutical; rather, he urges a broader approach that routinely considers other interventions, such as better sleep, exercise, nutrition, mindfulness, and rehabilitation. He calls for using multimodal care customized for each person, including mobilization physical therapy, acupuncture, and trigger point therapy. Gupta also highlights the importance of listening to patients' personal experiences - in essence, employing both medical science and empathy.