Medicine is continually evolving, and what you learned 10 years ago may be entirely outdated today. With the strain to keep up with all of the newest advances in an ever-changing industry, it’s unsurprising that many doctors spend the majority of their reading time catching up on the medical literature. Yet, becoming a doctor entails much more than merely understanding the most recent treatment standards.
Here are you a beginner Doctor? Here are the 10 Books Every Beginner Doctors Should Read;
1. Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research that’s Rewriting the Story
by Angela Saini
As the tagline implies, this book illustrates how the male-dominated area of science (from Darwin forward to current primatologists and biologists) contributed to prejudice in the image we have of women’s roles in our society. You’ll learn about great ape behavior, hunter-gatherer civilizations, sexual behavior, and how it all influences the design of medical studies. This a fast read that we suggest for anybody interested in learning more about the impact of sexism on scientific progress.
2. Second Suns: Two Doctors and their Amazing Quest to Restore Sight and Save Lives
by David Oliver Relin
This is the first book on our list that is technically still medical but in a non-medical sense. We follow the tales of two ophthalmologists, Geoffrey Tabin, and Sanduk Ruit, as they try to save tens of thousands of people from avoidable blindness in the Himalayan foothills.
This is a heartwarming true tale about the unique ability of every doctor to make a meaningful and quantifiable change in the world. Another fantastic doctor saves the day! the narrative may be found in the Hospital By The River—a book that recounts the extraordinary tale of Dr. Catherine Hamlin as she struggles to treat fistula victims in Ethiopia.
3. On Death and Dying By Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Death is a troubling subject that is often ignored in the media and by physicians themselves. Doctors are often professionally prepared for these circumstances, but on a personal level (particularly at the start of their careers), they feel disoriented and unsure of how to comprehend and empathize with what dying patients are going through.
On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy, and Their Own Families is a ground-breaking 1970 classic that outlines all five phases of grief—denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—thanks to Kübler-Ross he write many Books Every Beginner Doctors Should Read. Her sympathetic approach gives future doctors insights into the Sturm und Drang of the patient and family.
4. How Doctors Think By Jerome Groopman
The author of How Physicians Think discusses such complex challenges in the medical field as untreated or misdiagnosed diseases. Groopman addresses how physicians do not listen to their patients throughout therapy and why patients must speak for themselves.
He emphasizes the necessity of the patient’s active participation in the treatment process, stating that, despite the lack of an 11-year medical education, they have lived in their bodies their whole lives and know their bodies better than anybody else. This is one of the greatest medical books for aspiring physicians, and it is on the list of Books Every Beginner Doctors Should Read.
5. The Soul of Medicine: Tales from the Bedside By Sherwin B. Nuland
The Soul of Medicine: Stories from the Bedside is a Canterbury Tales-style homage to the interaction between physicians and patients. It is one of the greatest Books Every Beginner Doctors Should Read, with remarkable anecdotes from anesthesiologists, heart surgeons, and others.
6. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End By Atul Gawande
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters, in the end, is one of the greatest Books Every Beginner Doctors Should Read and is well worth the time you spend reading it. Medical education teaches you how to manage, save, and prolong people’s lives.
Nevertheless, you do not consider maximizing the time a patient has left to live. After reading this book, you will begin to wonder what good intentions, well-being, and quality of life truly entail. It’s undoubtedly one of the best medical texts for students.
7. When Breath Becomes Air By Paul Kalanithi
Paul Kalanithi’s work, When Breath Becomes Air, is one of the motivating books for physicians. He penned his amazing, nerve-wracking, and optimistic book while dying from metastatic lung cancer. Strongly recommended as one of the books physicians should read and one of the top medical Books Every Beginner Doctors Should Read.
8. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer By Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, tells cancer’s 5,000-year history. Despite all of the breakthroughs that experts have achieved in treating the ailment that everyone is frightened of, the underlying problem remains the same. While dealing with this terrible condition, you’ll discover intriguing clinical case studies and patient narratives in this book.
9. Every Patient Tells a Story By Lisa Sanders
Every Patient Tells a Tale, authored by the same woman who inspired the TV program House, MD, with her New York Times Magazine “Diagnosis” column, is another must-read among the Books Every Beginner Doctors Should Read. Sanders investigates the physical examinations, testing, and training that go into difficult diagnoses in this book. What should a doctor do when a patient’s profile suggests one thing but testing reveal a whole other story?
10. The House of God By Samuel Shem
It’s the only book on our list that will tell you amusing and absurdist anecdotes about six new interns at a Boston teaching hospital. What could be more in its favor than the fact that it inspired popular pop cultures TV shows such as Saint Elsewhere and Scrubs? The House of God peels aside the blue ER curtain to reveal how “the battle is real” moments occur from the first-day medical students join the professional hospital atmosphere. Absolutely the finest book for a medical internship, so give it a go.
