Medicine audiobooks

My Stroke of Insight

By: Jill Bolte Taylor

Narrated by: Jill Bolte Taylor

Length: 5 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

The astonishing New York Times bestseller that chronicles how a brain scientist's own stroke led to enlightenment.

On December 10, 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor, a thirty-seven-year-old Harvard-trained brain scientist experienced a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. As she observed her mind deteriorate to the point that she could not... Read more

Concussion (Movie Tie-in Edition)

By: Jeanne Marie Laskas

Narrated by: Hillary Huber

Length: 9 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • Dr. Bennet Omalu discovered something he could not ignore. The NFL tried to silence him. His courage would change everything.
 
“A gripping medical mystery and a dazzling portrait of the young scientist no one wanted to listen to . . . a fabulous, essential read.”—Rebecca Skloot, author... Read more

A Lucky Life Interrupted

By: Tom Brokaw

Narrated by: Mark Bramhall

Length: 5 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A powerful memoir of a dramatic year spent battling cancer and reflecting on a long, happy, and lucky life—from the bestselling author of The Greatest Generation, whose iconic career in journalism has spanned more than fifty years

Tom Brokaw has led a fortunate life, with a strong marriage and family, many friends, and... Read more

The Patient's Playbook

By: Leslie D. Michelson

Narrated by: Leslie D. Michelson

Length: 10 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

Too many Americans die each year as a result of preventable medical error—mistakes, complications, and misdiagnoses. And many more of us are not receiving the best care possible, even though it’s readily available and we’re entitled to it. The key is knowing how to access it.

The Patient’s Playbook is a call to action. It will change the way you... Read more

NeuroLogic

By: Eliezer Sternberg

Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith

Length: 10 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

A groundbreaking investigation of the brain’s hidden logic behind our strangest behaviors, and of how conscious and unconscious systems interact in order to create our experience and preserve our sense of self.
 
From bizarre dreams and hallucinations to schizophrenia and multiple personalities, the human brain is responsible for a diverse... Read more

Every Patient Tells A Story

By: Lisa Sanders

Narrated by: Lisa Sanders

Length: 10 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

A riveting exploration of the most difficult and important part of what doctors do, by Yale School of Medicine physician Dr. Lisa Sanders, author of the monthly New York Times Magazine column "Diagnosis," the inspiration for the hit Fox TV series House, M.D.

"The experience of being ill can be like waking up in a foreign country. Life, as... Read more

Hallucinations

By: Oliver Sacks

Narrated by: Dan Woren & Oliver Sacks

Length: 9 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

Hallucinations don’t belong wholly to the insane. Much more commonly, they are linked to sensory deprivation, intoxication, illness, or injury. Here Dr. Sacks weaves together stories of his patients and of his own mind-altering experiences to illuminate what hallucinations tell us about the organization and structure of our brains, how they have... Read more

Second Suns

By: David Oliver Relin

Narrated by: Rob Shapiro

Length: 15 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

From the co-author of Three Cups of Tea comes the inspiring story of two very different doctors—one from the United States, the other from Nepal—united in a common mission: to rid the world of preventable blindness.
 
In this transporting book, David Oliver Relin shines a light on the work of Geoffrey Tabin and Sanduk Ruit, gifted... Read more

Catastrophic Care

By: David Goldhill

Narrated by: Dean Sluyter

Length: 12 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

A visionary investigation that will change the way we think about health care: how and why it is failing, why expanding coverage will actually make things worse, and how our health care can be transformed into a transparent, affordable, successful system.
In 2007, David Goldhill’s father died from infections acquired in a hospital, one of more... Read more

The Spark

By: Kristine Barnett

Narrated by: Kathe Mazur

Length: 10 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

Kristine Barnett’s son Jacob has an IQ higher than Einstein’s, a photographic memory, and he taught himself calculus in two weeks. At nine he started working on an original theory in astrophysics that experts believe may someday put him in line for a Nobel Prize, and at age twelve he became a paid researcher in quantum physics. But the story of... Read more

The Story of My Father

By: Sue Miller

Narrated by: Sue Miller

Length: 5 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

In the fall of 1988, Sue Miller found herself caring for her father as he slipped into the grasp of Alzheimer's disease. She was, she claims, perhaps the least constitutionally suited of all her siblings to be in the role in which she suddenly found herself, and in The Story of My Father she grapples with the haunting memories of those final... Read more

The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

By: David Shields

Narrated by: Don Leslie

Length: 6 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

Mesmerized–at times unnerved–by his ninety-seven-year-old father’s nearly superhuman vitality and optimism, David Shields undertakes an investigation of the human physical condition. The result is this exhilarating audiobook: both a personal meditation on mortality and an exploration of flesh-and-blood existence from crib to oblivion–an... Read more

My Age of Anxiety

By: Scott Stossel

Narrated by: Michael Goldstrom

Length: 15 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

A riveting, revelatory, and moving account of the author’s struggles with anxiety, and of the history of efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand the condition
 
As recently as thirty-five years ago, anxiety did not exist as a diagnostic category. Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness.... Read more

Strength in What Remains

By: Tracy Kidder

Narrated by: Tracy Kidder

Length: 8 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

Tracy Kidder, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of the bestsellers The Soul of a New Machine, House, and the enduring classic Mountains Beyond Mountains, has been described by the Baltimore Sun as the “master of the non-fiction narrative.” In this new book, Kidder gives us the superb story of a hero for our time. Strength in What Remains... Read more

The Mind's Eye

By: Oliver Sacks

Narrated by: Oliver Sacks & Richard Davidson

Length: 8 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

In The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the power of speech, the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the ability to read, the sense of sight. For all of... Read more

League of Denial

By: Mark Fainaru-Wada & Steve Fainaru

Narrated by: David H. Lawrence XVII

Length: 14 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “meticulously documented and endlessly chilling” (The New York Times) exploration of the NFL’s decades-long attempt to deny and cover up mounting evidence connecting football and brain damage.

“A first-rate piece of reporting [that] adds crucial detail, texture, and news to the concussion story, which despite the... Read more

The Cancer Chronicles

By: George Johnson

Narrated by: Arthur Morey

Length: 8 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

When the woman he loved was diagnosed with a metastatic cancer, science writer George Johnson embarked on a journey to learn everything he could about the disease and the people who dedicate their lives to understanding and combating it. What he discovered is a revolution under way—an explosion of new ideas about what cancer really is and where... Read more

The Diet Fix

By: Yoni Freedhoff M.D.

Narrated by: Yoni Freedhoff M.D.

Length: 9 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

With The Diet Fix, weight loss expert Dr. Yoni Freedhoff offers a groundbreaking, useable guide to begin living happily while losing weight permanently.

It is time to break the cycle of traumatic dieting. Despite the success stories publicized by Atkins, South Beach, Weight Watchers, and others, 90% of all diets end in failure. How can we fix... Read more

On the Move

By: Oliver Sacks

Narrated by: Dan Woren

Length: 11 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.” It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his... Read more

Switched On

By: John Elder Robison

Narrated by: John Elder Robison

Length: 11 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

An extraordinary memoir about the cutting-edge brain therapy that dramatically changed the life and mind of John Elder Robison, the New York Times bestselling author of Look Me in the Eye

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST

Imagine spending the first forty years of your life in darkness, blind to the emotions and social... Read more

The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly

By: Matt McCarthy

Narrated by: Matt McCarthy

Length: 8 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

A scorchingly frank look at how doctors are made, bringing readers into the critical care unit to see one burgeoning physician's journey from ineptitude to competence.

In medical school, Matt McCarthy dreamed of being a different kind of doctor—the sort of mythical, unflappable physician who could reach unreachable patients. But when a new... Read more

Girl in the Dark

By: Anna Lyndsey

Narrated by: Hannah Curtis

Length: 7 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: No

Haunting, lyrical, unforgettable, Girl in the Dark is a brave new memoir of a life without light.

     Anna Lyndsey was young and ambitious and worked hard; she had just bought an apartment; she was falling in love. Then what started as a mild intolerance to certain kinds of artificial light developed into a severe sensitivity to all light. 
    ... Read more

He Wanted the Moon

By: Mimi Baird & Eve Claxton

Narrated by: Jane Alexander, Paul Boehmer & John Bedford Lloyd

Length: 6 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

Soon to be a major motion picture, from Brad Pitt and Tony Kushner

A Washington Post Best Book of 2015

A mid-century doctor's raw, unvarnished account of his own descent into madness, and his daughter's attempt to piece his life back together and make sense of her own.
 
Texas-born and Harvard-educated, Dr. Perry Baird was a rising medical star in... Read more

The Knife Man

By: Wendy Moore

Narrated by: Steve West

Length: 13 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his gothic horror story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he based the house of the genial doctor-turned-fiend on the home of John Hunter. The choice was understandable, for Hunter was both widely acclaimed and greatly feared.
 
From humble origins, John Hunter rose to become the most famous anatomist and surgeon of the... Read more