*** Bottle of Lies by Katherine Eban

Before I read Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom, I thought generic drugs were a great way to contain health care costs and bypass the eye-watering greed of drug companies. In this account, there are enormous holes in the way the FDA oversees the quality of generic-drug manufacturing, especially in foreign countries but even within the US. Even if we set aside ethical concerns about knowingly sending substandard drugs to third-world countries, it’s amazing that the FDA seems unable to employ the most basic best practices to conduct useful inspections: don’t schedule them in advance, go on the production floor, ask workers direct questions. Yes, this is a story of a small set of companies and plants but it poses fundamental questions about regulators.

** Soundtrack of Silence by Matt Hay

Soundtrack of Silence: Love, Loss, and a Playlist for Life recounts the harrowing story of a man plagued by a very rare genetic condition that made him deaf, and also affected his balance, as a young man. He recounts his surgeries and difficult (partial) recovery, peppered with all the pop tunes he can recall, which are many and made me feel rather ignorant. Despite the extravagant optimism of the author, it’s a reminder that medicine is, at best, imperfect, and hidden disabilities are everywhere.

*** The Good Virus by Tom Ireland

Four years ago almost to the day, I reviewed The Perfect Predator, which told the harrowing tale of a patient ultimately saved by the use of a custom phage. The Good Virus: The Amazing Story and Forgotten Promise of the Phage gives a more expansive description of viruses that attack bacteria (phages) and how they could be harnessed to help fight infections–if only they would behave according to the laws of Big Pharma and the FDA.

I was delighted to see that the heroics portrayed in The Perfect Predator are not necessarily required to take advantage of this therapy, but it looks like the bureaucratic obstacles will take some work to resolve, let alone the many scientific challenges.

** Foreign Bodies by Simon Shama

A timely book after the Covid pandemic, Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations retraces the history of smallpox, cholera, and plague complete with horrifying scenes of death and suffering, and the various men (all men!) who identified the pathogens and developed treatments and vaccines. No detail is too small, from what Proust père was busy with to the political infighting at the Pasteur Institute and other similar research centers. It makes for a rich story but also a very long one, which might have benefited from fewer side stories.

** Womb by Lea Hazard

There’s plenty to learn about uteruses (for the layperson and for doctors, too!) and Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began does a good job of laying out the known and the unknown. I did not enjoy the author’s many rants about sermonizing doctors, ridiculous self-care regimens, and ignorant politicians–not that there is not reason to rant, but it makes for an angry tone that detracts from the rest of the book.

** A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung

A Living Remedy recounts the author’s travails with her aging parents. She lives thousands of miles away, has small children, and her parents have been living paycheck to paycheck, while she herself is well educated and comfortable, but not enough to support them in a way she would like to, especially as a pandemic limits travel. I felt frustrated on her behalf.

** Code Gray by Farzon Nahvi

Code Gray: Death, Life, and Uncertainty in the ER is the competently written but predictable memoir of an emergency room doctor, with the expected vicissitudes of normal human beings thrown into the very strange position of patients with big problems.

I thought the best parts were one, when the author explains, very candidly, his personal experience as a new resident having to give very bad news to a patient, and failing badly at first. And the other is the first chapter, when he shares texts exchanged by fellow ER physicians during the Covid pandemic when no one really knew how to treat patients and they had to invent their own protocols (and, sadly, their own protective equipment, too).

** The People’s Hospital by Ricardo Nuila

The physician who authored The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine seems to be a caring and competent physician, and has many interesting comments about the way the American health system fails to work for many patients while costing us much more than anywhere else in the world–but the book is messy and less convincing than it could be.

His arguments are mostly directed at the way health care is funded, and yet he chooses to tell us the convoluted stories of various patients, which do illustrate the struggles of uninsured patients but, to me at least, introduce all kinds of extraneous details that would not be necessary to push his thesis: that we should stop the system of private insurance and go for taxpayer-funded health care. The hospital where he works is a so-called safety net hospital and seems to work very well indeed, both for doctors and patients, and at a surprisingly affordable cost for the local taxpayers, but could it be that it has an exceptional administrator? Or that the mix of patients is favorable? And of course the mental shift from private to public funding is pretty much unimaginable in the US today. Maybe one day?

*** Sometimes People Die by Simon Stephenson

Sometimes People Die is a search for a serial killer in a hospital with an opioid-addicted physician as the hero, so may not suit everyone’s taste–but I loved the dry sense of humor and did not mind the fact that I figured out the culprit early on. The fame-seeking detective adds another layer of enjoyment. Dark and delightful.

* Unwell Women by Elinor Cleghorn

On page 306 of Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World, the author discloses that she has lupus and that she was diagnosed after a long delay during which her symptoms were dismissed and she was treated shabbily. At that point, the book made sense to me as it reads like a (very) long rant. There’s much to say, sadly, about how medicine has not treated women kindly, from dismissing them entirely, to match their general status in society, to inflicting cruel treatments to make them conform to rigid and sexist societal rules. I would have wanted the book to better show how medicine failed both men and women in many instances, and to also analyze the relative weights of societal strictures and the exclusion of women from medicine.