Fascinomas Fascinating Medical Mysteries

The author shares some of the most memorable, bizarre, interesting, but all true, stories from his medical career.

This is the first book to offer a critical analysis of one variant of the mystery story or novel—the use of a physician as the major detective. There is little difference between a medical “case study” and a mystery story. The book reviews the works of major authors, from R. Austin Freeman, Helen McCloy, Josephine Bell, and H.C. Bailey, to Patricia Cornwell, Kathy Reichs, Aaron Elkins, and Colin Cotterill, with briefer reviews of minor authors. It also addresses historical (fictional) physician detectives, psychological detectives, and physician detective nonfiction. Physicians and health workers are avid readers of detective fiction and will welcome this volume, which addresses their specific interests. Its critical analysis of books that have long been viewed as central to detective fiction will also appeal to fans of the mystery story.

Medical Mysteries takes you to the front lines of the medical fringe, where absolutely anything is possible.From the files of the hit ABC primetime show Medical Mysteries comes this impossible-to-put-down collection of the strangest medical stories you are ever likely to hear.

A woman lies dying in ICU and no one know what is killing her. A young man complains of memory loss so severe that he can't remember the events of the last hour. What does a doctor do when the patient profile says one thing and the tests say another? Making a diagnosis is a doctor's most challenging and crucial task. Most of the time, a physical examination and routine tests provide what's needed to begin a course of treatment. But sometimes the symptoms are deceptive, tests are misleading, and obvious treatment options prove woefully inadequate. In Every Patient Tells a Story Dr Lisa Sanders combines the drama of TV show House with the living, breathing world of real hospitals and real patients. She shares examples of doctors facing complex medical mysteries to create an endlessly fascinating medical detective story and illustrate the science - and art - of diagnosis. 'Not 'whodunit' so much as 'whatdunit', Lisa Sanders' book brilliantly conveys the sleuthing that lies at the heart of medical diagnosis. But this is more than a set of suspenseful tales unfolded by a skilled storyteller. Enlightening for patients, essential for practitioners, this book should be read by every doctor. I'm praying that mine will.' GERALDINE BROOKS

Modern technology has given rise to electronic medical records, remote monitoring systems, and satellite-enabled real-time examinations in which patient and physician might be separated by thousands of miles. Yet, when it comes to diagnosing difficult cases, the clinician's strongest asset might just be one of the oldest tools of the medical profession-careful listening. True Medical Detective Stories is a fascinating compendium of nineteen true-life medical cases, each solved by clinical deduction and facilitated by careful listening. These accounts present puzzling low-tech cases-most of them serious, some humorous-that were solved either at the bedside or by epidemiological studies. Dr. Clifton Meador's book is a wonderful contribution to the genre of medical detective stories mastered by the legendary Berton Roueché. As a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1944 until his death fifty years later, Roueché popularized this form, which has provided source material for feature films and most recently supplied scenarios featured in medical television dramas, such as House. While Hollywood frequently oversimplifies and elides the real clinical situations, True Medical Detective Stories sets the record straight with a voice of authority and an engaging style rooted in the fact that most of the cases presented involve Dr. Meador's actual patients. Dr. Meador discovered Berton Roueché's writing as a teenager, when he first read Eleven Blue Men. In an astonishing twist of fate, Roueché, in later years, traveled to Nashville to meet with Dr. Meador and discuss one of his cases, with Roueché's account published posthumously under the title, The Man Who Grew Two Breasts. In a fitting tribute to Roueché, this perplexing case is revisited by Dr. Meador in the opening chapter of this highly enjoyable book. True Medical Detective Stories is a captivating read that will keep you marveling over the idiosyncrasies of the human body and the ingenuity of the human mind.

A collection of more than fifty hard-to-crack medical quandaries, featuring the best of The New York Times Magazine's popular Diagnosis column—now a Netflix original series “Lisa Sanders is a paragon of the modern medical detective storyteller.”—Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal As a Yale School of Medicine physician, the New York Times bestselling author of Every Patient Tells a Story, and an inspiration and adviser for the hit Fox TV drama House, M.D., Lisa Sanders has seen it all. And yet she is often confounded by the cases she describes in her column: unexpected collections of symptoms that she and other physicians struggle to diagnose. A twenty-eight-year-old man, vacationing in the Bahamas for his birthday, tries some barracuda for dinner. Hours later, he collapses on the dance floor with crippling stomach pains. A middle-aged woman returns to her doctor, after visiting two days earlier with a mild rash on the back of her hands. Now the rash has turned purple and has spread across her entire body in whiplike streaks. A young elephant trainer in a traveling circus, once head-butted by a rogue zebra, is suddenly beset with splitting headaches, as if someone were “slamming a door inside his head.” In each of these cases, the path to diagnosis—and treatment—is winding, sometimes frustratingly unclear. Dr. Sanders shows how making the right diagnosis requires expertise, painstaking procedure, and sometimes a little luck. Intricate, gripping, and full of twists and turns, Diagnosis puts readers in the doctor’s place. It lets them see what doctors see, feel the uncertainty they feel—and experience the thrill when the puzzle is finally solved.

Drawing from an ongoing series of conferences designed to teach clinical problem-solving skills, Mackowiack (U. of Maryland School of Medicine), offers case histories of the health problems of a dozen long-dead famous figures diagnosed from modern medical perspectives. Illustrations depict patients including the odd-looking Pharaoh Akhenaten, C

"In this book, Dr. Meador draws on his nearly sixty-year medical career for nuggets of advice with both compassion and humor. Although there may not be a defined medical disease behind every physical symptom, Dr. Meador reminds us that the reason behind a symptom may be found if a doctor observes and listens carefully to a patient. He believes an effective physician treats a patient, not just a patient's disease"--