Type of Teaching Material: Bibliography/reading list

Books to pair with Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal

In February 2025, contributors to the Health Humanities Consortium listserv provided these recommendations in response to a question about readings that would pair well with Atul Gawande's, Being Mortal. The following works were suggested by various members of the listserv:

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
The Emperor of Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb
Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad
You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith
I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong
The First Cell by Azra Raza
Gray Matters by Theodore H. Schwartz
Shattered by Hanif Kureishi
The People’s Hospital by Ricardo Nuila
Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
The Soul of Care by Arthur Kleinman
Early by Sarah DiGregorio
Final Exam by Pauline W. Chen
In Pain by Travis Rieder
Reverence for Life by Marvin Meyer
Sentenced to Science by Allen M. Hornblum
When Winter Came by Mary Beth Sartor Obermeyer
All that Really Matters by David Weill
Do No Harm by Henry Marsh
The Inevitable Hour by Emily Abel
Final exam A surgeon’s reflections on mortality by Pauline W. Chen.
In Shock, by Dr. Rana Awdish
And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life.Sharon Kaufman

In addition, Allan Peterkin of the University of Toronto has assembled a Grief and Loss Reading list (in collaboration with the Canadian Grief Alliance). The Graphic Medicine Interactional Collective also has curated a page of comics on end-of-life, entitled Death Panels: Comics and End of Life.

Bibliography: Patient-provider communication stories

A student got interested in patient-provider communication in a part of a course devoted to health narratives. I pulled this together for them as a starting place for them to look further.

Para vivir con salud: Leyendo la salud y la literatura.

This open-access resource describes itself this way: "Para vivir offers an introduction to reading different literary and cultural texts from the Spanish-speaking world with a thematic focus on health. It can be used as an alternative to the standard Introduction to Hispanic Literature course texts, as it also teaches techniques of close reading. It incorporates authors from seventeen counties, has an almost even representation of male and female authors and diverse communities in the Hispanic world (European, Creole, Afro Hispanic, Latinx, Indigenous, Jewish). In addition to introductions to reading different genres (narrative, poetry, theater, and film) we have scaffolded supporting material such as biographies, notes on the historical contexts, pre and post-reading questions." Although framed in terms of its uses for literature courses, the literary selections here could be incorporated into many other intermediate and higher level Spanish courses in which reading and composition are central activities. Much primary source material is included in the book itself; when not available due to copyright, there are suggestions on how instructors might be able to access them on their own. Beyond the readings themselves, the book includes a great deal of pedagogical material (introduction to genres and reading strategies), a bibliography that introduces health humanities and links literature to the work of health professionals; ideas for syllabus construction. It is downloadable.

List of resources on Grief

In February 2024, the following request was posted to the Health Humanities listserv: "I'm in the process of compiling a reading list for people (of all ages) who are grieving /working through loss. I'd like to include: poetry anthologies, graphic or traditional memoirs, novels/short story collections, children's picture books/youth fiction, and story-based films." The request came from Allan Peterkin at the University of Toronto, who is compiling a list. Not surprisingly, recommendations also included works on death and dying. The attached document provides a list I compiled from this thread of the listserv.

Bibliography of poetry collections

In this blog post, poet Celeste Lipkes recommends poems she characterizes as "confronting difficult-to-discuss medical diagnoses." Her list includes a variety of conditions and the poems are written from a variety of perspectives, including health care providers, family members, and patients. She provides a brief synopsis of each collection, including examples.

She reviews (and provides links to purchase) the following poetry collections:

Radium Girl by Celeste Lipkes: A physician writes about her experience as a young woman with Crohn’s disease
Black Aperture by Matt Rasmussen: A man writes about his brother’s suicide
Big–Eyed Afraid by Erica Dawson: A black woman writes about her experiences of bipolar disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder
Blue Sonoma by Jane Munro: A wife writes about the progression of her husband’s Alzheimers
We Mad Climb Shaky Ladders by Pamela Spiro Wagner: A woman writes about her experience of schizophrenia
The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle by Tom Andrews: A motocross racer writes about having hemophilia
Deluge by Leila Chatti addresses medical care for women’s reproductive health, including her treatment for heavy uterine bleeding
The Tradition by Jericho Brown: A black man writes about, among other things, his HIV diagnosis
Impossible Bottle by Claudia Emerson: poems published posthumously by a woman who died from cancer
Still Life by Jay Hopler: poems published posthumously by a man who died from prostate cancer