By Ted Spiker

Serendipity slithered onto my nightstand this summer because two of my favorite science writers published new books.

I turned onto Mary Roach two decades ago with her tale about cadavers, Stiff, which prompted me to salivate over every release since, including Bonk (about sex), Gulp (the alimentary canal), and her latest, Replaceable You, on the quest to build body parts. An elite storyteller with an eye for the quirky, Roach delivers wow-oh-wow information with LOL prose.

I anticipated that David Epstein’s new book, Inside the Box — about the positive influence of constraints on creativity and innovation — would help me teach my journalism students at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, Gainesville, Florida. Epstein’s research spans medicine and science, offering deep insight into how our brains solve problems and dream of ideas.

We all read for different reasons — information, entertainment, escape. But today, as we fight for time to invest in pleasure reading, we also know that reading things other than journal articles and textbooks expands our minds and makes us better in our careers and lives — either via directly applicable information or via stories, metaphors, and wisdom that lead us to consider our world a little differently. (Case in point: Chris Ballard’s new book on cold-water immersion, The Plunge, convinced me to finish my morning shower with a dose of icy energy. I’ll probably pass on racing in 40-degree water, though.)

To that end, I asked a panel of experts — including Roach, Epstein, and several literary medical professionals — this question: What’s a book every clinician should read?

The parameters: Any genre goes — fiction, nonfiction, current, or historical — as long as it ties to medicine or health. Below are their picks. Take a look and share your own recommendations in the comments.

A Visceral Glimpse of Historical Suffering

In the Land of Pain, by Alphonse Daudet

A French writer in the 1800s, Daudet developed a nerve disease from advanced syphilis, and this book — a collection of Daudet’s notes — recounts his pain. “Though the late stage of his disease is very rarely observed today, the historical distance vanishes thanks to the visceral and intense descriptions of his suffering,” Amit Majmudar, MD, said. “We get an insight into the history of our profession and the nature of illness in a past era.”

Shattering Verse on the Emotional Impact of Illness

Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair by Christian Wiman

This book — with themes of despair, suffering, faith, and relationships — includes poetry, criticism, and memoir in what was called a new form of writing. “Wiman is not just one of the most musical poets and astute editors of his generation,” Majmudar said. “He is also a cancer survivor who has documented the spiritual and emotional impact of his illness in shattering verse and prose.”

A Dark History of Surgery Before Antiseptic or Anesthesia

The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine by Lindsey Fitzharris

This book centers around 19th-century surgery and the quest of the Quaker surgeon Joseph Lister to clean up its dangers. “As in all her books, Fitzharris combines top-flight historical research with just the right amount of delightfully lurid detail,” Roach said.

An Unflinching Look at Corruption in Science

Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions by Richard Harris

Centering around bad science that costs money and lives, this book is “about the problems inherent in current medical research: biases, poorly controlled studies, the push for ‘breakthroughs,’ and the resulting lack of replication studies,” Roach said.

The Tragic Tale of a Medical Pioneer

Genius Belabored: Childbed Fever and the Tragic Life of Ignaz Semmelweis by Theodore G. Obenchain

This page-turner about the life of the Hungarian obstetrician focuses on Semmelweis’ discovery that hand hygiene could decrease death rates caused by infection. (He noticed that women giving birth under physicians’ care died more often than those cared for by midwives, because the doctors would go right from handling cadavers to delivering babies.) “The tragic part of the story was that he was completely ostracized because there was no germ theory and no explanatory model” for Semmelweis’ handwashing protocol, Avraham Z. Cooper, MD, said. “He eventually had a mental health crisis, but he was doing something that would save many, many, many lives — he was just ahead of his time.” Key takeaway: “In the face of uncertainty and disruption, be open to new evidence,” Cooper said.

An Exploration of Death Through the Warmth of Life

This Party’s Dead: Grief, Joy and Spilled Rum at the World’s Death Festivals by Erica Buist

In this book, the writer confronts death and grief by visiting seven death festivals around the world — in Mexico, Nepal, Sicily, Thailand, Madagascar, Japan, and Indonesia — with a detour to New Orleans, in search of answers about how humans deal with mortality. Christianne Strang, PhD, said she liked the book because it’s written with warmth, humor, and curiosity and focuses on a topic that’s necessary but difficult to talk about. “The knowledge that there are so many different approaches to remembrance, and yet so many similarities, reminds me of shared humanity and that there is no single correct or wrong way to address death,” said Strang.

A Masterclass in the Poetry of Biology

The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher by Lewis Thomas

A physician and a poet, Thomas reflects on hidden relationships across diverse topics, such as computers and insects, in this classic collection of essays. “It brought poetry into biology, reminding me that science isn’t dry and cold; instead, science is inextricably intertwined with art and life,” Strang said.

Data That Tells the Untold Stories

Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health by Anupam B. Jena, MD, PhD, and Christopher Worsham, MD

Epstein called this book the Freakonomics of healthcare, using data to reveal surprising conclusions, such as how a big-city marathon can be a healthcare challenge for non-runners (the road blockages disrupt ambulance routes); how a surgeon’s birthday affects patient survival; and how a physician’s political leanings affect their assessment of a patient’s medical issues. “It’s a fascinating journey through hidden forces that shape healthcare outcomes,” Epstein said.

A Reminder That Every Patient Has an Interior Life

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel centers around the lives of three women from different eras, including Virginia Woolf, with themes of mortality. “The Hours reminds us that all of our patients carry powerful interior stories that lie beneath the surface,” Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, said.

A Sci-Fi Novel With Parallels to Reality

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

It was named a best fiction book of the century by several outlets, and Stephen Klasko, MD, said it’s “the most devastating healthcare novel ever written.” While it never mentions a hospital, the book is about clones raised to donate their organs. Klasko said, “Really, it’s about what happens when a system quietly decides some lives exist to extend others. Any physician who has watched the transplant list or the uninsured waiting room already knows this world.”

A Piercing Portrait of Burnout

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

This classic novel, adapted into a film starring Anthony Hopkins, won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Booker Prize. “A butler devotes his entire life to professional excellence and dignity, and in doing so misses his one chance at love and moral clarity,” Klasko said. “Swap the manor house for the hospital, and it’s the most piercing portrait of physician burnout ever written: a man who confused serving an institution with living a life. It’s every doc who’s missed a kid’s recital.”

A 150-Year-Old Indictment of the Healthcare System

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Written in 1871, the book remains the most accurate account of how healthcare systems grind down their innovators, Klasko said. It centers around a young, idealistic doctor who is slowly beaten by politics and institutional inertia. “Nothing about medicine’s resistance to change is new,” Klasko said. “Eliot diagnosed it 150 years before we started calling it transformation.”