Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Five top books by doctors

Gabriel Weston is an ear, nose and throat surgical specialist and author of the memoir, Direct Red: A Surgeon’s View of her Life-or-Death Profession.

One of her five best books by doctors, as shared at The Daily Beast:
Very soon after beginning my medical training, I started wanting to write. I would go to dissection classes, cut up a human cadaver, and then go home and write about what I had learned and felt. I didn’t think of this impulse as anything other than a kind of private therapy until, one day, a friend gave me a copy of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. This wonderful and highly autobiographical novel gave me my very first sense that the stuff I was witnessing in the hospital was worth writing about.
Read about another book Weston tagged.

Of Human Bondage is among Hallie Ephron's ten best literary tear-jerkers and Tad Friend's five best novels about success.

--Marshal Zeringue