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The Dark Side of Healing: Nonfiction Books on Medical Horrors
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items I first became interested in nonfiction books about healthcare in med school after seeing the injustices and dark sides of medicine firsthand. I believe nonfiction is a crucial genre to add to our TBR, whether as healthcare providers or future patien...
Sections
5
Medical Atrocities
Anatomy, Dissection & Surgery
The Politics of Pain
Healthcare during Wartimes & Disasters
Plagues, Pandemics & Epidemics
Medical Atrocities
-books that reveal the brutal, often hidden harm done in the name of medicine-
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells the story of a woman whose cells changed the world, yet she never knew, and her family was left in the dark for decades. It’s an unsettling look at how medical progress can lift humanity forward while breaki...
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Edwin Black shows us how “science” was used to justify cruelty through real stories and documented abuses. A great read on America’s eugenics movement.
War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race by Edwin Black
This book is a real gut-punch. It is a shame that this isn't far history. We still have people with families scarred by so called “scientific progress.” In my opinion, Medical Apartheid is a must read.
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans by Harriet A. Washington
Quackery shows how so many “cures” throughout history were nothing more than dangerous nonsense. From mercury tonics to arsenic pills, people were hurt, all because an authority figure claimed it was medicine.
Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything by Lydia King, MD
The Radium Girls tells the true story of young women who were told the glowing paint they worked with was harmless. This is an amazing read to see how how greed for “innovation” ended up with a tragedy and silenced victims.
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore
This is a great tale of what starts as curiosity later turning into a haunting look at the medical world. It’s a real investigative work by librarian Megan Rosenbloom about human skin bound books.
Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin by Megan Rosenbloom
Like most books on this list, this one is a heavy read, however, I believe we are responsible of knowing the full story behind this tragedy. Red D. Gray exposes the truth of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. He writes about how Black men were misled, deni...
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: A Shocking Experiment Conducted by Government Doctors Against African American Men by Fred D. Gray
Anatomy, Dissection & Surgery
-books that dive into the human body, from cadavers to surgical discoveries-
The Butchering Art tells the story of Joseph Lister, the surgeon who risked everything to make surgery less deadly. You’ll be shocked by the blood, infection, and sheer danger patients faced back then. Made me realize I was in fact born in the right ...
The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine by Lindsey Fitharris
When I started studying medicine, my classmates and I were shocked to realize we’d see cadavers more often than living patients in our first years. Stiff dives into afterlives of donated human bodies. This book does a great job at revealing how cadav...
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers Mary Roach
When I picked up Severed, I was equal parts fascinated and unsettled. Frances Larson explores the bizarre history of human heads. Apparently, many heads were lost, studied, and even displayed. The book does an incredible job of showing how our curios...
Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found by Frances Larson
After reading quite a few books on healthcare in the past, I assumed I wouldn’t be surprised anymore, yet Medieval Bodies still managed to catch me off guard. Not going to lie, I was a little grossed out, BUT also impressed at how people tried to tak...
Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages by Jack Hartnel
I won’t lie, some parts in The Knife Man made me cringe (and very glad I wasn’t alive back then), like when surgeons casually performed amputations without anesthesia while gossiping about the latest scandal. But that still doesn't change the fact th...
The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery by Wendy Moore
The Politics of Pain
-books that explore how pain is ignored, controlled, or politicized-
What first drew me to this topic was the politics of pain in healthcare. Pain: A Political History showed me just how much suffering is shaped not by cruelty, but by systems. During my education, I sometimes felt like being a good-hearted, smart doct...
Pain: A Political History by Keith Wail
I've done a good amount of internships in OB/GYN across multiple countries, and no matter the economic power of the healthcare system, I noticed the same troubling pattern: there’s almost always someone (usually a man) who tends to disregard a woman’...
Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World by Elinor Leghorn
The opioid epidemic is one of the topics I’m most interested in, and Melina Sherman shows how the same tactics of control and manipulation have been used throughout history. These tactics performed both in war and peace. Opioids hold immense power, a...
How We Hurt: The Politics of Pain in the Opioid Epidemic by Melina Sherman
The Pain Gap is written by a woman of color and brings an intersectional perspective to a feminist issue. Anushay Hossain shows how sexism and racism combine in healthcare to create real, very fatal consequences for women. It’s eye-opening, urgent, and a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how bias shapes medicine.
The Pain Gap: How Sexism and Racism in Healthcare Kill Women by Anushay Hossain
Sullivan and Ballantyne tell stories of patients in unimaginable pain, how their doctors tried to do the right thing, and policies surrounding this sensitive subject. Be prepared for getting angry at the loopholes in the system that was meant to prot...
The Right to Pain Relief and Other Deep Roots of the Opioid Epidemic by Mark D. Sullivan & Jane C. Ballantyne
As a society we tend to see medicine as this progressive, science heavy field, when in reality a big part of medicine depends on communication and perception. Today so few countries have access to a fully functioning healthcare system with proper equ...
The Politics of Pain Medicine: A Rhetorical-Ontological Inquiry by Scott Graham
Healthcare during Wartimes & Disasters
-books about how healthcare barely holds itself together in the hell of war and disaster-
.Even today's plastic and reconstructive surgery progression struggles to fully repair some disfigurations. Lindsey Fitzharris writes about a surgeon of World War I, working in unimaginable conditions. I liked how she didn't ignore the trial and erro...
The Facemaker: A Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I by Lindsey Fitzharris
John S. Haller Jr. shows what it really means to treat the wounded when resources are scarce. The fact that evacuation is a gamble in a field. What surprised me most was how much of modern emergency care was shaped by these desperate, improvised mome...
Battlefield Medics by John S. Haller Jr.
I don’t want to give any spoilers, but there were moments where I had to physically pause reading because the weight of knowing this actually happened was overwhelming. And honestly, I felt a strange guilt for struggling to process scenes that someon...
On Call in Hell: A Doctor's Iraq War Story by CDR. Richard Jadick
War Doctor by David Nott is intense, but in a different way than many other frontline medical memoirs. He does write about scarce sources, civilians, soldiers, however, he doesn't linger on the gory side of these stories for long. I recommend this on...
War Doctor: Surgery on the Front Line by David Nott
In medicine, the motto is “do no harm”. Unfortunately, in Auschwitz, it was “choose the least terrible option”. I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz is about how Gisella Perl bravely practiced medicine inside a death camp, and the struggles she faced. On a li...
I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz by Gisella Perl
The staff stuck inside Memorial Medical Center as the power died, and they pushed themselves through their limits to help patients. One of the doctors had to take very hard decisions only to later stand in a courtroom, defending decisions she never s...
Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink
If Five Days at Memorial was about the collapse of support during a natural disaster, War Hospital is about surviving in a disaster with no end in sight. Sheri Lee Fink follows the doctors and nurses working in a Bosnian hospital where they had to pe...
War Hospital: A True Story Of Surgery And Survival by Sheri Lee Fink
Plagues, Pandemics & Epidemics
-books that explore the spread, and impact of diseases throughout history-
Spillover will make you look at your cat, your dog, and even the squirrels in your backyard a little differently, because David Quammen shows how viruses don’t respect borders, species, or common sense. He takes you on a globe-trotting hunt for the o...
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen
After reading Murderous Contagion, I realized that humanity has been terrible at throwing parties without inviting a disease or two. Mary Dobson takes you on a whirlwind tour of history’s most infamous illnesses, from plague to smallpox, and somehow ...
Murderous Contagion: A Human History of Disease by Mary Dobson
The flu pandemic in 1918 was one of the deadliest events in human history, so deadly that some cities ran out of coffins. John M. Barry doesn't sensationalize the story, rather realistically writes about how it was to live through 1918. The Great Inf...
The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry
The Black Death is a catastrophe we’ve all at least heard of. The Great Mortality is grim in its all aspects, but what left me unsettled was realizing the scale of randomness of who survived and who didn’t.
The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly
If you want a read that will convince you how a single water pump in 1854 London could hold the fate of an entire neighborhood, The Ghost Map should be your choice. I didn't even know how diseases affected the mapping world. This book is clever, and ...
The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
Reading The American Plague felt like stepping into a horror story set in the early United States. During the 1793 yellow fever epidemic, streets emptied almost overnight, neighbors vanished, and authority figures fled the city entirely. It’s far mor...
The American Plague: The Epidemic That Shaped Our History by M. C. Crosby