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