Medical Journals

A week after her 41st birthday, Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living payslip to payslip who had always been the caregiver rather than the one needing care, the catastrophic condition was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness.

The late Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital when the world's first atomic bomb was dropped on the city. Though his responsibilities in the appalling chaos of a devastated city were awesome, he found time to record the story daily, with compassion and tenderness. Dr. Hachiya's compelling diary was originally published by the UNC Press in 1955, with the help of Dr. Warner Wells of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

After traveling 60 miles on horseback through snow to the Crawford cabin, Dr. Ephraim McDowell examines his patient. He realizes that he is not dealing with an overdue pregnancy, but an enlarged ovarian cyst. He gives the patient the grim news that he can do nothing to save her. She begs him to try to remove the life-threatening tumor.

Britney Daniels is a Black, masculine-presenting, tattooed lesbian from a working-class background. For the last five years, she has been working as an emergency-room nurse. She began Journal of a Black Queer Nurse as a personal diary, a tool to heal from the day-to-day traumas of seeing too much and caring too much. Hilarious, gut-wrenching, and infuriating by turns, these stories are told from the perspective of a deeply empathetic, no-nonsense young nurse, who highlights the way race, inequality, and a profit-driven healthcare system make the hospital a place where systemic racism is lived.

What do you do when suddenly, in one devastating moment, you’re a patient advocate—nurse—decision maker 24/7? You begin to search out and gather in the midst of all the caregiving. This journal recounts a caregiver's journey with a husband who suffered multiple strokes, lost his ability to talk, and fought his way back to living life fully in his highly individual—and ultimately wonderful, “new normal” way. Through the Fire will encourage caregivers not merely to survive but to thrive in walking their own ever-changing path.

Una preziosa e originale testimonianza su che cosa significhi cecità, dalle operazioni quotidiane a quelle più complesse, in forma di diario scritta da un uomo che è diventato cieco a quarant'anni. Hull, parte dal racconto della discesa nel buio per arrivare a spiegare quello che definisce "il dono oscuro": uno stato in cui la mente recide ogni legame sensoriale con la vita precedente e, per sopravvivere, inventa un nuovo linguaggio.

On a late spring day, the United States of America is hit with a biological terror attack that brings the nation to her knees. The virus is deadly and highly contagious. It spreads like wildfire, infecting, and killing almost everyone it hits.

Liz Ottebein shines the light on a world behind the locked doors of a psychiatric hospital. For 14 years, she wrote a journal. Today, sharing 39 stories out of it, she wants to give back humanity to people who are so easily labelled and so often not heard.