General Reading for Prospective Medical Students
The more you read, the faster you get, and the broader your vocabulary becomes. These skills (fast reading, large vocabulary) are essential for managing the volume of work in medical school.
But beyond that, reading can be a great pleasure and a wonderful inspiration. Books become “classics” for a reason. Many of these are available free online, at, for example, http://www.underthesun.cc/ or
http://www.online-literature.com/author_index.php.
The Literature, Arts and Medicine Database is another excellent resource.
When asked which books have inspired them, and which books should be recommended to aspiring physicians, Ross faculty suggested the following titles. We hope you can find the time to enjoy a few.
Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
Albert Camus, The Plague
Guido Ceronetti, The Silence Of The Body: Materials For The Study of Medicine
Anton Chekhov, Ward 6
Coles, R. and Testa, R., A Life in Medicine – a literary anthology
A.J. Cronin, The Citadel
Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year
Joan Didion, The Year Of Magical Thinking
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Anne Fadiman, The spirit catches you and you fall down
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Sebastian Faulks, Human Traces
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love In the Time Of Cholera
Atul Gawande, Better
Gerald Green,The Last Angry Man
Jerome Groopman, How Doctors Think, and The Anatomy Of Hope: How People Prevail In The Face Of Illness
Thomas Hardy, Tess Of The D'Urbervilles
Douglas Hofstadter, I Am A Strange Loop
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis
Jonathan Kaplan, The Dressing Station
Ken Kesey, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
James Le Fanu, The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine
Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
William Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
Frank Ryan, Tuberculosis: The greatest story never told
Richard Selzer, Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery
George Bernard Shaw, Back To Methuselah
Samuel Shem, The House of God
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
Stolley and Lasky, Investigating Disease Patterns: The Science of Epidemiology
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
William Carlos Williams, The Doctor Stories
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
