Craving a fun medicine-related book? Here are some great ones I have read. They make especially good reading for students applying to medical school or interested in getting up to speed before their first year. They also make great reading between your first and second year, as a kind of pick me up to re-inspire you. Personally, these books have been very helpful in getting me through medical school. I highly recommend them all, but have marked my absolute favorites with an asterisk. Happy reading!
Microbiology
*Microbe Hunters / Paul De Kruif
New Guinea Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers : Tales of Parasites and People / Robert S. Desowitz
The Cholera Years : The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 / Charles E. Rosenberg
Ninety-Nine Gnats, Nits, and Nibblers / May R. Berenbaum
Life With the Pneumococcus : Notes from the Bedside, Laboratory, and Library / Robert Austrian
Rats, Lice and History: A Chronicle of of Pestilence and Plagues / Hanz Zinsser
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance / Laurie Garret
Medicine/Surgery
Social Transformation of American Medicine / Paul Starr
The Care of Strangers : The Rise of America's Hospital / Charles E. Rosenberg
Anatomy of an Illness As Perceived by the Patient / Norman Cousins
Bottoms Up! : A Pathologist's Essays on Medicine and the Humanities / William B. Ober
Boswell's Clap and Other Essays : Medical Analyses of Literary Men's Afflictions / William B. Ober
In the Country of Illness : Comfort and Advice for the Journey / Robert Lipsyte
Seeing Voices : A Journey into the World of the Deaf / Olvier Sacks
Confessions of a Knife / Richard Selzer
Mortal Lessons : Notes on the Art of Surgery / Richard Selzer
The Horse and Buggy Doctor / Arthur Emanuel Hertzler
As I Remember Him (the Biography of R. S.) / Hans Zinsser
Five Patients / Michael Crichton
House of God / Samuel Shem
The Doctor's Dilemma / Bernard Shaw
Hematology
Blood: An Epic of Medicine and Commerce / Douglass Starr
Neurology
Awakenings / Oliver Sacks
Searching for Memory : The Brain, the Mind, and the Past / Daniel L. Schacter
Miscellaneous
The Medical Detectives / Berton Roueche
*Eleven Blue Men and Other Narratives of Medical Detection / Berton Roueche
The Discovery of Insulin / Michael Bliss
They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus : Tales of Medicine and the Art of Discovery / Gerald Weissmann