And It's About Time There Was Some Support For Cushing's!
Many helpful books are prohibitively expensive, so you may want to check them out of the library, if possible. I found these from amazon.com interesting.
If you know of any good books that I've left out from this list, please let me know.
Awakenings by Oliver Sacks
It hardly seems fair that so many great doctors are also great writers. Perhaps it's qualities like
sensitivity, craft, and dedication that keep physicians like Oliver Sacks in hospitals all day and at
writing desks all night; if nothing else, these qualities shine in books like Awakenings. This powerful
set of case histories rises above its pathological foundation to find new literary territory, a
medical-spiritual synthesis equally stimulating for the mind and the soul. It's no wonder Hollywood
producers chose to turn it into a feature film--anyone can see the universal human struggle against
bondage and despair in these pages.
The sleeping-sickness epidemic of 1918 caused hundreds of survivors to slip into a bizarre rigid paralysis with similarities to advanced Parkinson's disease. These patients, only occasionally able to communicate or move, were nearly all institutionalized for life, their ranks increasing every now and then with similarly afflicted men and women. Sacks came to work at a long-term care facility shortly before the first exciting results with L-dopa and Parkinson's in the late 1960s; his patients soon embarked on dramatic, difficult recoveries from up to 50 years of torpor. He documents their spiritual and medical obstacles with great care to portray their individual personalities, long suppressed but finally released. Though many great doctors are also great writers, few can compare with Oliver Sacks for expressing the relation of medicine to the human spirit. --Rob Lightner
