100 Best Medicine Books of All Time

Barack Obama

Former USA President

President Obama is spending his Hawaiian vacation playing golf, getting together with high school friends and reading a handful of dark novels set in foreign lands, according to a book list released by the White House Wednesday. The presidential reading list includes … two works of non-fiction for the trip: … "Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End" by Dr. Atul Gawande. [source]

Malcolm Gladwell

Writer & Journalist

American medicine, Being Mortal reminds us, has prepared itself for life but not for death. This is Atul Gawande's most powerful--and moving--book. [source]

Indra Nooyi

Board of Directors/Amazon

Just finished "Being Mortal" by Atul Gawande. A beautifully written book. Captivating. [source]

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

I don’t know how Kalanithi found the physical strength to write this book while he was so debilitated by the disease and then potent chemotherapy. But I’m so glad he did. He spent his whole brief life searching for meaning in one way or another -- through books, writing, medicine, surgery, and science. I’m grateful that, by reading this book, I got to witness a small part of that journey. I just wish the journey hadn’t been cut so short [source]

Ryan Holiday

Author

Despite its popularity, When Breath Becomes Air is actually underrated. It’s make-you-cry good. [source]

Bethany S. Mandel

More Shabbat reading recommendations: This book was breathtaking and such a powerful advertisement for the joy of parenthood. https://t.co/V8BH97eiL9 [source]

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

I loved this brilliant book about cancer. [source]

Timothy J. Jorgensen

A tremendous amount of cancer biology comes through in that book through the eyes of the victims and the people up close and personal. [source]

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

A great read. [source]

David Allen

Author

Atul is really talking about how absolutely powerful checklists are, and I think he makes a very creative point: that checklist are not just some static, boring thing. They actually allow you to do excellent work and free up your brain by not having to keep remembering what you need to do when. That then allows your brain to be a lot more creative about whatever it is you’re doing. [source]

Jack Dorsey

Co-Founder/Twitter

recommends this book because he knows that top notch execution is essential to business. [source]

A.J. Jacobs

Great writer. [source]

Carl Zimmer

Yes. This is a fascinating book on so many different levels. It is really compelling as the story of the author trying to uncover the history of the woman from whom all these cells came. [source]

Bradley Voytek

I can’t imagine one day waking up and not knowing who my wife is, or seeing my wife and thinking that she was replaced by some sort of clone or robot. But that could happen to any of us. [source]

Suzanne O'Sullivan

I didn’t choose neurology because of it but the way Oliver Sacks writes about neurology is very compelling. [source]

Tanya Byron

This is a seminal book that anyone who wants to work in mental health should read. It is a charming and gentle and also an honest exposé of what can happen to us when our mental health is compromised for whatever reason. [source]

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

"Mukherjee wrote this book for a lay audience, because he knows that the new genome technologies are at the cusp of affecting us all in profound ways," Gates wrote. Mukherjee is what Gates calls a "quadruple threat." He's a practicing physician, teacher, researcher, and author. [source]

Amit Paranjape

@vikramsathaye @DrSidMukherjee @kiranshaw Great book. [source]

Bryan Johnson

A great book. [source]

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

On Bill Gates's reading list in 2011. [source]

Richard Branson

Founder/Virgin Group

Today is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. [source]

Cecile Richards

Everyone has to read this book. I guess I just picked it for anyone who hasn’t read it and if you’re a progressive and you’re trying to figure out what to do with your life. Tracy Kidder is a great writer so that doesn’t hurt, but Paul Farmer’s story, the story of one person who decides they want to change the world, is so compelling. I think even for the most cynical, hard-bitten progressive you can’t help but read this book and feel inspired. So it’s a lot of levels. [source]

Christina Reynolds

Interesting book on medicine with broader applications for all of us. https://t.co/KUeHOPWMom [source]

Elad Yom-Tov

He has a way of explaining the medical world in a manner that is both compassionate but also very much data driven. [source]

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

Explains how neglecting sleep undercuts your creativity, problem solving, decision-making, learning, memory, heart health, brain health, mental health, emotional well-being, immune system, and even your life span. [source]

Brad Feld

Co-Founder/Foundry Group

Several friends, who know I both love to sleep and am intrigued with how sleep works, recommended that I read Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. It was excellent. While my self-assessment of my sleep habits are very positive, I learned a few things. More importantly, I now have a much better understanding of the “Why” surrounding sleep, especially around sleep’s importance to a healthy and long life. [source]

Alexis Ohanian Sr.

Agree! Best book I've read this year. Wasted so many hours just proving to myself I'd be the last one up working at @reddit and for what??? Stupid. Diminishing marginal returns after enough hours without sleep. https://t.co/cT7fDNBF3A [source]

Jon Najarian

I believe both the corona virus and ebola have a bat connection. Scary, but great book on ebola: Hot Zone by Richard Preston https://t.co/jGEjbrB7pZ [source]

Pierre Haski

@ChuBailiang The hot zone, it made my days during SARS in Beijing, a great book! https://t.co/8E8AYgIhp7 [source]

Jessica Flitter

The readability for me is probably the key element for students—and maybe for teachers as well—because it’s a book that you really can’t put down. If that’s what we need to make students readers, then I’m all for it. [source]

Joann Corleyschwarzkopf

Need a fun boost for your team? Want to jump-start great problem-solving? >Book a 1-hour #creativethinking, virtual experience & get a complimentary pdf copy - Brain on Fire: Unleashing Your Creative Superpowers! for each attendee #teambuilding Info here: https://t.co/j6hOxMJrNH https://t.co/b9hAxV90Mf [source]

Barack Obama

Former USA President

As a devoted reader, the president has been linked to a lengthy list of novels and poetry collections over the years. [source]

Daniel Hamermesh

This novel from a decade ago should be read by every American interested in immigration. While it deals with a lot of medical details, the essence of it is about urban life in developing countries and about the immigrant experience. It is both moving and thought-provoking. [source]

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

A bunch of my friends recommended this one to me. Carreyrou gives you the definitive insider’s look at the rise and fall of Theranos. The story is even crazier than I expected, and I found myself unable to put it down once I started. This book has everything: elaborate scams, corporate intrigue, magazine cover stories, ruined family relationships, and the demise of a company once valued at nearly $10 billion. [source]

Andrew Chen

General Partner/Andreessen Horowitz

Finished “bad blood” on the Theranos scandal. Wow. Just wow. It’s a must read for everyone in tech and startups. Just 1-click buy it :) Amazing how far charisma and social proof got them. Here’s the NYT review of the book https://t.co/PyMGxfoG2R [source]

Brad Feld

Co-Founder/Foundry Group

Every entrepreneur and VC should read this book. John Carreyrou has done something important here. Maybe this book will finally put a nail in the phrase “fake it till you make it”, but I doubt it. The amount of lying, disingenuousness, blatant and unjustified self-promotion, and downright deceit that exists in entrepreneurship right now is at a local maximum. This always happens when entrepreneurship gets trendy. Carreyrou just wrote a long warning for entrepreneurs and VCs. [source]

Antonio Eram

This book was recommended by , Founder of NETOPIA mobilPay, when asked for titles he would recommend to people interested in understanding the world around them. [source]

Dave Collum

I guess it is a good time to point out that "The Great Influenza" is a great book. If you think modern medicine would have mitigate this one, you haven't read the book. https://t.co/t4uHPgfLE6 [source]

Greg Dworkin

@heshsson yes1 brilliant book, which also explains flu better than most other things you will read [source]

Timothy Ferriss

Author & Entrepreneur

I agree wholeheartedly with a lot of the co-opted science, which people can read a book called Bad Science, which is by a doctor named Ben Goldacre. It’s great. [source]

Bryan Callen

Great book, yeah. [source]

Charles Poliquin

You would stop making those dumb comments if you read this book. [source]

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

Fascinating.... Lays a foundation for understanding human history. [source]

Daniel Ek

A brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning book about how the modern world was formed, analyzing how societies developed differently on different continents. [source]

Simon Sinek

Author

I’m a fan of books that challenge our assumptions, and Diamond offers us a new and remarkably simple way of looking at our world. Learning to challenge existing assumptions is core to effective leadership for it trains us to keep an open mind. [source]

Arthur Ammann

He was concerned because his friends were infected and some of them were dying. [source]

Clara Jeffery

Book is great but the movie pretty great too and horrifying similar failure of politicized science, just a way shorter timetable now https://t.co/TRUiKs9WTR [source]

Jonathan Rauch

A harrowing vision of what a world without marriage finally looks like. [source]

Carol Dweck

For me it was exciting to read this book because while my research shows a growth mindset is really good for you, this book shows that a growth mindset also has a strong basis in modern neuroscience. It illustrates, though fascinating case histories and descriptions of recent research, the amazing power of the brain to change and even to reorganise itself with practice and experience. [source]

Bogdana Butnar

I don't have favourite books. I equate a favourite something with wanting to do it over and over again and I've never wanted to read a book too many times. I have favourite authors and I have books that changed me in significant ways because they moved me or taught me something or changed my view of the world. So, here's some of those books... [source]

Naveen Jain

I think the book that I really, really enjoy was, "The Brain That Changes Itself." It's all about neuroplasticity, you'd really love that book. [source]

Alison Alvarez

I read the Ghost Map, a book about 1854 London Cholera outbreak. The outbreak was stopped because of a map created by Dr. John Snow. You can see hints of this map in some of our customer discovery tools because it was such an effective way of pinpointing a solution to a seemingly insurmountable problem. [source]

Seth Mnookin

The Ghost Map is a book that I oftentimes give to people to show them how cool and exciting and accessible and gripping stories about scientific discoveries can be. [source]

Stephen Evans

Johnson looks at London during a specific moment in time, August 1854, and focuses on a particular incident, an outbreak of cholera in Soho, in Central London. [source]

Daniel Goleman

Author

Michael Pollan masterfully guides us through the highs, lows, and highs again of psychedelic drugs. How to Change Your mind chronicles how it’s been a longer and stranger trip than most any of us knew. [source]

Yuval Noah Harari

Historian

Changed my mind, or at least some of the ideas held in my mind. [source]

Andrew Weil

Michael Pollan assembles a great deal of information here on the history, science, and effects of psychedelics. I found his frank recounting of his recent experiences with LSD, psilocybin, and toad venom most revealing. They appear to have softened his materialistic views and opened him to the possibilities of higher consciousness. He did, indeed, change his mind. [source]

Jonathan Glover

Kay Redfield Jamison is a psychologist who has co-authored the major psychiatric textbook on manic depression. It authoritatively covers every aspect of the science, from genetics to pharmacology, and also has chapters on the links with creativity and on what the illness feels like. The chapters on the subjective experience are enriched with vivid quotations from patients. In her autobiography, An Unquiet Mind, Kay Jamison came out as not only an expert on the illness but also someone who has it. The power of her book comes from her understanding it both scientifically and from the inside. [source]

Tanya Byron

This is a divine book. A patient of mine who suffers with a bipolar illness, an absolutely inspiring young genius, recommended it to me. So I read it, and then we discussed it in a lot of our sessions together. [source]

Ezekiel J. Emanuel

Through vivid, heart wrenching stories and trenchant analysis, Libby Rosenthal unveils the irrationality, indifference, harmfulness, and downright unfairness of the American health care system that can often seem more driven by profit than caring and compassion. She also offers tremendously helpful advice to patients on how to navigate the system to ensure they get the best outcomes. [source]

Ro Khanna

.@RosenthalHealth is 100% correct to go after large hospitals for their excessive fees & executive pay. I represent a district with Sutter & Kaiser, but we need to “rein in hospital excesses.” Her book American Sickness is a must read. https://t.co/sqhPgIcoDN [source]

Aniela Gregorek

I gained a deeper understanding of how music affects our moods and our brains. [source]

Justin Boreta

Justin Boreta said this is one of his most-recommended books. [source]

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

Influenced the decision that Melinda and I made to make polio eradication the top priority of the foundation, as well as my own personal priority. [source]

Seth Mnookin

What I find so impressive about this book is that Oshinsky really does cover the whole history of a disease but does so in a way that you never feel you’re getting a CliffsNotes version. It’s a pretty unwieldy topic: you could write an entire book just about the year the polio vaccine was rolled out, or what happened since then, or you could write a book, as Paul Offit did, just about the Cutter incident. All the way through Polio you feel like you are getting all the details you would want or need. To combine that much information in a way that was not only accessible and exciting and readable but also scientifically rigorous was a real, real accomplishment. [source]

Arthur Ammann

It’s an amazing book, considering Camus probably never personally experienced a plague. In his novel, Camus captured everything that we were dealing with in the Aids epidemic without Aids existing at that time. Without his knowing what the consequences of the HIV plague were going to be, he seems to have gotten all the actors in there and the myriad of things that you wrestle with. [source]

Jenny Davidson

Albert Camus’s The Plague probably remains the best-known novel on the topic of epidemic disease. It tells the story of those involved in an epidemic in a North African setting. It is very interested in the details about how quarantines are enforced and the role not just of the government, but of individuals who band together into groups to manage the epidemic. [source]

Stephen Breyer

He talks about the plague. Well, the plague is that part of a human being which can be very evil. That germ, he says at the end, never dies, it simply goes into remission. It lurks. It lurks in the cupboards, it lurks in the hallways, it lurks in the filing cabinets. [source]

Isabel Hardman

Bit rubbish at recommending books but have recently finished a few which are worth your while. 1. War Doctor by David Nott @NottFoundation. My god this book will move you and teach you. I find the medical world fascinating and loved the accounts of surgical procedures... [source]

Pam Ayres

I am currently reading this book by David Nott and finding it a jaw-dropping, inspiring read. It is fascinating insight into an unknown world. Also, having scrutinised and absorbed the medical detail, I now feel ready to tackle any surgical procedure large or small. https://t.co/hBltDRqDLL [source]

Pan Macmillan

✨ @Waterstones Non-Fiction Book of the Month for January 2020 ✨ @NottFoundation's War Doctor is a powerful account of his time spent performing life-saving operations in the most challenging conditions. https://t.co/U6aCc5BGWH https://t.co/pzU0bzTpLm [source]

Jennifer Gunter

@EdzardErnst @SLSingh Fantastic book. Really. Thank you for writing it!! [source]

Stephen Law

I really like this book. It’s a modern classic of the sceptic movement. Simon Singh is an excellent science writer. Edzard Ernst is the world’s first professor of complementary medicine. Well he was, Ernst is retired now. He started out convinced that there was some truth to the claims made by homeopathy and some other alternative practices. He was trained as a homeopath and he was a practising homeopath. He believed homeopathy worked. He then decided to investigate the treatments scientifically, to show that they worked, and he found that they didn’t. The therapies that he practised didn’t come out well from this scrutiny. It turned out that the evidence didn’t support the beliefs that he previously held, and so he gave up those beliefs. Ernst thinks that some complementary medicine may work, but the vast majority of it simply does not. I like Tim Minchin’s question: What do you call alternative medicine that’s been scientifically proven? Answer: medicine. The problem with alternative ‘medicine’, very often, is there’s very little good scientific evidence for its efficacy. Very often, the ‘evidence’ is anecdotal. We’ve already seen two examples of how weak anecdotal evidence is – the story about the 1967 UFO, and the thousands of anecdotes collected by the Christian Science movement. If you want to know whether something works, don’t rely on the anecdotes which can seem very convincing, look at the data. Run controlled studies, and if those studies reveal that the therapy doesn’t work, then you really shouldn’t believe it does, notwithstanding the fact that you can point to those anecdotes. [source]