Here are 100 books that The Body Multiple fans have personally recommended if you like
The Body Multiple.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I have an annoying habit of figuring out why someone says or believes what they do—and think that is more interesting than their actual ‘truth’. I try to keep this in check during social events (it can make for painful dinner table conversations if I go too far). Still, it means the general take on the medical humanities (and I’d put all the books below in that wide category) is something I’m passionate about. Why do we believe what we do about health? About disease? About the body? And why do we think medical doctors have the truth for us?
I read this book 3 months into the COVID-19 pandemic and LOVED it—it totally made me realize that: 1. we’ve been here before; 2. our reactions and responses are all tried and true (and probably not that useful); and 3. we would survive this time, too—at least most of us.
This is Daniel Defoe (yes, you know him from Robinson Crusoe) explaining what it was like to live in London when the plague came. It wasn’t pretty. The most chilling moment in the book came at the end, when I googled facts about the plague, realized it went away, and then came back repeatedly for decades.
The haunting cry of "Bring out your dead!" by a bell-ringing collector of 17th-century plague victims has filled readers across the centuries with cold terror. The chilling cry survives in historical consciousness largely as a result of this classic 1722 account of the epidemic of bubonic plague — known as the Black Death — that ravaged England in 1664–1665. Actually written nearly 60 years later by Daniel Defoe, the Journal is narrated by a Londoner named "H. F.," who allegedly lived through the devastating effects of the pestilence and produced this eye witness account. Drawing on his considerable talents as…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I have an annoying habit of figuring out why someone says or believes what they do—and think that is more interesting than their actual ‘truth’. I try to keep this in check during social events (it can make for painful dinner table conversations if I go too far). Still, it means the general take on the medical humanities (and I’d put all the books below in that wide category) is something I’m passionate about. Why do we believe what we do about health? About disease? About the body? And why do we think medical doctors have the truth for us?
I love this book for two reasons. 1. The content: It is so well researched and clearly shows how unequal access to medical care is only part of the reason health levels and outcomes are unequal. We need to consider many other layers, like how medical studies are done, where people live, and what they are exposed to in their physical and social environments. 2. The writing: Villarosa is a genius! She writes so well and compellingly about complex things; I totally get her arguments, even when they deal with academic topics.
NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF 2022 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES
The first book to tell the full story of race and health in America today, showing the toll racism takes on individuals and the health of the nation.
In the US, Black people have poorer health outcomes than white people at every stage of their lives: Black babies are more than twice as likely as white babies to die at birth or in the first year of life; Blacks in every age-group under sixty-five have significantly higher death rates than whites. Racial disparities in…
I have an annoying habit of figuring out why someone says or believes what they do—and think that is more interesting than their actual ‘truth’. I try to keep this in check during social events (it can make for painful dinner table conversations if I go too far). Still, it means the general take on the medical humanities (and I’d put all the books below in that wide category) is something I’m passionate about. Why do we believe what we do about health? About disease? About the body? And why do we think medical doctors have the truth for us?
Everything is relative…and this book makes me feel like a normal person. Ivan Illich is one of the 20th century’s great thinkers (google him), and he has inspired many of the current critical studies fields that are gaining headway in the academy.
He was a man of principles. In this book, he lays out his principled reasons for why our current medical industrial complex in the West is making us unhealthy and unhappy. And what an alternative would look like. You did google him, right? So, you know what that alternative made him look like in the end…
"The medical establishment has become a major threat to health." This is the opening statement and basic contention of Ivan Illich's searing social critique. In Limits to Medicine Ivan Illich has enlarged on this theme of disabling social services, schools, and transport, which have become, through over-industrialization, harmful to man. In this radical contribution to social thinking Illich decimates the myth of the magic of the medical profession.
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
I have an annoying habit of figuring out why someone says or believes what they do—and think that is more interesting than their actual ‘truth’. I try to keep this in check during social events (it can make for painful dinner table conversations if I go too far). Still, it means the general take on the medical humanities (and I’d put all the books below in that wide category) is something I’m passionate about. Why do we believe what we do about health? About disease? About the body? And why do we think medical doctors have the truth for us?
I don’t live in the USA, so the American debates about gun control and against universal health care often seem…odd. Why would someone think this is a bad thing? Metzl’s book gives at least one explanation.
Using interviews and observations, he shows how right-wing backlash policies are actually supported by people who are hurt by them because they appeal to a race-based sense of identity and privilege. This book was painful for me, but it explained some things that the news doesn't cover.
As Dying of Whiteness shows, the right-wing policies that resulted from this white backlash put these voters' very health at risk-and in the end, threaten everyone's well-being. Physician and sociologist Jonathan M. Metzl travels across America's heartland seeking to better understand the politics of racial resentment and its impact on public health. Interviewing a range of Americans, he uncovers how racial anxieties led to the repeal of gun control laws in Missouri, stymied the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and fueled massive cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. Although such measures promised to restore greatness to white America,…
This list opens the door to the inner life of physicians: our hopes, fears, insecurities, and all of the internal and external pressures we face in our training and practice. As a doctor, I see myself in these books—not a superhero with “all of the answers,” but a human being in a profession suffering one of the largest crises of workforce burnout and moral injury. Seeing our physicians as real people will help us feel more empowered to bring our own true selves to the relationship. And really good healthcare is more likely to happen when souls connect.
This is an honest, vulnerable book in which the author, an experienced physician at the top of his game, questions his own approach to patients.
Are we doctors as “scientific” as we think we are, or are we just dependent on rigid protocols and implicit, incorrect beliefs that cause harm? The book provides a road map for doctors and lay readers alike to rethink the doctor-patient relationship and all the decision-making that comes from it.
A groundbreaking, profound view of twenty-first-century medical practice, giving doctors and patients the vital information they need to make better judgments together.
On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within eighteen seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong—with catastrophic consequences. In this revolutionary book, Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make, offering direct, intelligent questions patients can ask their doctors to help them get back on…
I find that one of the advantages of having worked as a professor (now Emerita ) of German at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, is that it helped me gain perspective. When I study literature–especially in languages other than English–I am forced to step outside of my everyday world to identify the motif and leitmotif of the author. I am proposing that the medical training of these five authors helped them do the same: to dig below the surface to find other structures and root causes and to present their findings and unique diagnoses.
I recommend these short stories for both younger and older readers. In the latter case, they may well be re-reads and if so, they are essential reading in that they lead the reader to reevaluate past aspirations and ambitions. Chekhov’s medical training is immediately apparent in his uncanny ability to dissect both personal and societal issues.
Though the diagnosis is frequently abrupt and unexpected, the treatment is less obvious. For example, in Gooseberries, written in 1898 as part of a trilogy, the reader is left with no doubt about the diagnosis of the social pretentiousness and even cruelty of the central character, but the possibility that happiness is elusive lingers like the pervasive smell of tobacco on the armchair. These stories are a must-read by the fireside on a rainy night, with the wind howling outside.
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the highly acclaimed translators of War and Peace, Doctor Zhivago, and Anna Karenina, which was an Oprah Book Club pick and million-copy bestseller, bring their unmatched talents to The Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, a collection of thirty of Chekhov’s best tales from the major periods of his creative life.
Considered the greatest short story writer, Anton Chekhov changed the genre itself with his spare, impressionistic depictions of Russian life and the human condition. From characteristically brief, evocative early pieces such as “The Huntsman” and the tour de force “A Boring Story,” to his…
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away, leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion.
Before becoming a writer I was a divorce lawyer, so I have plenty of personal experience about the dark side of relationships and I admit to a slight obsession with the human psyche, what goes on behind closed doors and beneath people’s façades! Consequently I love to tell stories about relatable characters who get caught up in extraordinary situations, relationships, pressures, dilemmas or crime. I also enjoy performing a literary sleight of hand in my novels and hopefully surprising my readers!
The book starts with a wife asking her husband who else he would sleep with, if he could. I loved this hook which any one of us might ask in a casual way, anticipating our partner to say ‘only you, darling!’ When the husband doesn’t give the expected reply, it unsurprisingly opens a can of worms which kept me turning the pages. This compulsive, sexy, roller coaster of a story didn’t disappoint me.
'Thrilling, unputdownable, a fabulous rollercoaster of a read - I was obsessed by this book' B A PARIS, bestselling author of BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
'Compulsive reading with characters you will love to hate and an ending that will make your jaw drop.' JENNY BLACKHURST
One evening, a wife asks her husband a question: who else would you go for, if you could? It is a simple question - a little game - that will destroy her life.
Carly and Rob are a happy couple. They share happy lives with their children and their…
My connection with the Andean highlands of southern Peru stretches back to 1975 when I spent about a year in a small community of Quechua-speaking potato farmers and llama herders. I have returned there many times over the years, most recently in 2019. Its people, their way of life, and vision of the world are dear to my heart and are the subject of The Hold Life Hasas well as a play, creative nonfiction, and, more recently, poetry. I love the way anthropology forces me to think outside the box and experience the world with different eyes, something I aim to convey in my work.
This book is about an unexpected meeting of minds. De la Cadena intended to write an account of a peasant campaign for land led by indigenous peasant leader Mariano Turpo during the 1950-60s. But early on it became clear that she and Mariano were talking past each other, for Mariano understood his successful activism in terms of his relationship with animate places in the landscape (“earth beings”). The book contains a moving account of how the urban intellectual and traditional Andean leader learned to appreciate and communicate with each other. De la Cadena argues that attention to cultural difference—far from perpetuating false consciousness—might open the way to radically new politics. Some readers may wish to pass over some dense theoretical passages, but the book is organized so one can do this without losing the larger picture.
Earth Beings is the fruit of Marisol de la Cadena's decade-long conversations with Mariano and Nazario Turpo, father and son, runakuna or Quechua people. Concerned with the mutual entanglements of indigenous and nonindigenous worlds, and the partial connections between them, de la Cadena presents how the Turpos' indigenous ways of knowing and being include and exceed modern and nonmodern practices. Her discussion of indigenous political strategies-a realm that need not abide by binary logics-reconfigures how to think about and question modern politics, while pushing her readers to think beyond "hybridity" and toward translation, communication that accepts incommensurability, and mutual difference…
Sandy is a writer, traveller, and hopeful romantic with a lengthy bucket list, and many of her travel adventures have found homes in her novels. She’s also an avid reader, a film buff, a wine lover, and a coffee snob. She lives in Melbourne, Australia with her partner, Ben, who she met while travelling in Greece. Their real-life love story inspired Sandy’s debut novel One Summer in Santorini, the first in the five-book Holiday Romance series. The series continues in Paris, Sydney, Bali, and Tuscany. Sandy's standalone novel The Christmas Swap celebrates her favourite time of the year, and her rom-com, The Dating Game, is set in the world of Reality TV.
Kaye’s own diagnosis of a neurological disease sparked the idea for this terrific book―the protagonist, Alex, is diagnosed with MS and transforms her life to avoid being seen as ‘the victim.’ Like the author, Alex displays incredible bravery―she’s terrified of what’s to come but makes active steps in her life to follow her professional and creative dreams, as well as letting someone new into her life. This one tugged at my heartstrings.
Meet Alex. She has a wonderful fiance, a job she thrives in, and a best friend she's known since childhood. Life's not perfect, but it's pretty fantastic. Until a shock diagnosis suddenly throws everything off course.
But Alex has never been one to back down from a fight. Now single and unemployed, she packs up and moves from her Glasgow hometown to vibrant Birmingham for a fresh start. In a new job, in a new city, she's learning all over again what's important in life.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
All of these books inspired me to become a better writer and to push my imagination to the limit by getting The Ballad of Perilous Graves onto the page. These books made me want to polish the contents of my own imagination and tell the biggest most heartfelt story I could. Ballad is in good company on library and bookstore shelves, so I wanted it to connect as hard as possible.
Giddings takes the stories of Henrietta Lacks and the Tuskegee experiments and extrapolates them into the present day. A young woman dealing with crushing medical debt agrees to participate in medical trials with strange and debilitating side effects. This book is horrific, lyrically written, and brimming with emotion.
Electric Literature: One of 55 Books by Women and Nonbinary Writers of Color to Read in 2020 | Lit Hub & The Millions: Most Anticipated Books of 2020 | Ms. Magazine: Anticipated 2020 Feminist Books | Refinery29: Books by Black Women We are Looking Forward To Reading | One of The Millions' Most Anticipated Reads of 2020 | Amazon Book of the Month Pick | Audible Editor's Pick | Essence's Pick| Glamour's Must Read | Ms. Magazine's Anticipated Read of 2020
A startling debut about class and race, Lakewood evokes a terrifying world of…
