Physician Assistant Resources: Inspiration

A look into the darkly funny world of Claire Bennett who initiates a dubious relationship with a widower while confronting fantastical hallucinations of his dead wife. With her feisty housekeeper-cum-caretaker ever at her side, Claire searches for human connection and self-forgiveness in this tale of personal redemption.

Investigates the health care crisis in America by following a diverse group of uninsured individuals as they battle critical illnesses without proper care. Filmed prior to Affordable Care Act.

Successful surgeon Jack McKee who is businesslike and aloof with his patients finds his whole life changing when he is found to have throat cancer.

Follows a group of seven doctors for 21 years, from their first day at Harvard Medical School in 1987. The trials and tribulations as these individuals struggled to become doctors and balanced time at work and at home are documented in the difficult years of classes and clinical training, internship and residency, marriage and divorce. In the second part, Nova returns one last time to get an update on the kind of doctors and people they have become.

Satirical look at a large metropolitan hospital where the patients die of neglect, the interns chase the nurses, the head of the hospital contemplates suicide and there's someone killing off the staff.

In this historical reenactment, Florence Nightingale uses applied statistics to disprove the medical assumptions of her day. Using fatality counts from the Crimean War, Nightingale develops a progressive series of statistical diagrams that reveal startling information: most soldiers did not die of their wounds, as reported, but in army hospitals from diseases related to poor hygiene. When further data shows army death rates twice that of the civilian population, Nightingale traces the cause to overcrowded, disease-ridden barracks.

Meet Patch Adams, a doctor who doesn't look, act or think like any doctor you've met before. For Patch, humor is the best medicine, and he's willing to do just about anything to make his patients laugh-- even if it means risking his own career. Based on a true story.

This four-part television series examines our broken health care system. The films address critical health care issues facing America including patient safety, medical and medication errors, hospital-acquired infections, family-centered care, and the effective management of chronic disease. The program focuses on the advances in improving the quality of patient care and profiles of individuals who are committed to fixing a health care system that is estimated to kill up to 98,000 people a year. Changing the way health care is provided in the United States is a difficult but vital task, necessitating a working partnership between patients, families, and providers.

"Caring for our family members, friends, and others is a central part of a rewarding life. For those in healing and helping professions such as medicine, nursing, education, psychotherapy, social work, ministry, and the military, the potential for a meaningful way of being may even become more possible. But, compassion is not easy.

Profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir by a young neurosurgeon faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis who attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a naïve medical student "possessed," as he wrote, "by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life" into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

"In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of nineteenth-century surgery on the eve of profound transformation. She conjures up early operating theaters--no place for the squeamish--and surgeons, working before anesthesia, who were lauded for their speed and brute strength.

David Oshinsky chronicles the history of America's oldest hospital and in so doing also charts the rise of New York to the nation's preeminent city, the path of American medicine from butchery and quackery to a professional and scientific endeavor, and the growth of a civic institution.

Bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending. In the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Gawande argues that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families & offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly. Full of eye-opening research and riveting storytelling, Being Mortal asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end.

Today he is known as Dr. Q, an internationally renowned neurosurgeon and neuroscientist who leads cutting-edge research to cure brain cancer. But not too long ago, he was Freddy, a nineteen-year-old undocumented migrant worker toiling in the tomato fields of central California. This gripping memoir is a testament to persistence, hard work, the power of hope and imagination, and the pursuit of excellence. It's also a story about the importance of family, of mentors, and of giving people a chance.

Bestseller. The struggle to perform well is universal: each of us faces fatigue, limited resources, and imperfect abilities in whatever we do. But nowhere is this drive to do better more important than in medicine, where lives may be on the line with any decision. Gawande examines, in riveting accounts of medical failure and triumph, how success is achieved in this complex and risk-filled profession. At once unflinching and compassionate, Better is an exhilarating journey, narrated by "arguably the best nonfiction doctor-writer around" (Salon.com).

A brilliant and courageous doctor reveals, in gripping accounts of true cases, the power and limits of modern medicine. Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside with one's own eyes. This book is exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is -- complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human.

In May 1971, Look magazine featured an article entitled "Chicago's Cook County Hospital: A Terrible Place." The article provided an in-depth look at the largest public hospital in the country, one located on Chicago's dangerous gang-controlled and drug-infested West Side. Months later, the author, then a nave suburban teen, and one hundred other nursing students, began their training there. Cooked provides an inside look at the 2,000-bed ghetto hospital, often referred to as a "19th-century sick house," that provided health care to millions of Chicago's poor.

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother's death and their father's disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles--and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.

A sharp-eyed expose of the deadly politics, murderous plots, and cutthroat rivalries behind the first blood transfusions in seventeenth-century Europe.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. A magnificent, profoundly humane "biography" of cancer-from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. An astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with-and perished from-for more than five thousand years. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.

Presents a series of stories about men and women who, representing both medical and literary oddities, raise fundamental questions about the nature of reality.

Tracy Kidder is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the author of the bestsellers. This powerful and inspiring new book shows how one person can make a difference, as Kidder tells the true story of a gifted man who is in love with the world and has set out to do all he can to cure it. At the center of Mountains Beyond Mountains stands Paul Farmer. Doctor, Harvard professor, renowned infectious-disease specialist, anthropologist, the recipient of a MacArthur grant, world-class Robin Hood, Farmer was brought up in a bus and on a boat, and in medical school found his life' calling: to diagnose and cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most.

Florence Nightingale was for a time the most famous woman in Britain, if not the world. We know her today primarily as a saintly character, perhaps as a heroic reformer of Britain's health-care system. The reality is more involved and far more fascinating. In an utterly beguiling narrative that reads like the best Victorian fiction, acclaimed author Gill tells the story of this richly complex woman and her extraordinary family. Combining biography, politics, social history, and consummate storytelling, Nightingales is a dazzling portrait of an amazing woman, her difficult but loving family, and the high Victorian era they so perfectly epitomized.

When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos. The Hmong, traditionally a close-knit and fiercely people, have been less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of their ancestors. Lia's pediatricians, Neil Ernst and his wife, Peggy Philip, cleaved just as strongly to another tradition: that of Western medicine. Lia's story became a tragic case history of cultural miscommunication.

is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two thousand years, cadavers, some willingly, some unwittingly, have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They've tested France's first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender reassignment surgery, cadavers have been there alongside surgeons, making history in their quiet way.

Why would a talented young woman enter into a torrid affair with hunger, drugs, sex, and death? Through five lengthy hospital stays, endless therapy, and the loss of family, friends, jobs, and all sense of what it means to be "normal," Marya Hornbacher lovingly embraced her anorexia and bulimia -- until a particularly horrifying bout with the disease in college put the romance of wasting away to rest forever. A vivid, honest, and emotionally wrenching memoir, Wasted is the story of one woman's travels to reality's darker side -- and her decision to find her way back on her own terms.

Ben Carson is one of the most celebrated neurosurgeons in the world. He tells of his inspiring odyssey from his childhood in inner-city Detroit to his position as director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital at age 33. Filled with fascinating case histories, this is the dramatic and intimate story of Ben Carson's struggle to beat the odds.

A loud-and-clear call for action from a leading surgeon to make American healthcare more transparent, more democratic and better for patients.