BOOK REVIEW - SKILL:  The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I

Author: Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris

Book Reviewer: Sarah Ludington

Despite aspiring to practice surgery one day, I had never truly considered its origins—surgical care seemed too essential to be able to trace its history back to a single moment of inception. While The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris follows Dr. Harold Gillies, historically recognized as the “father of modern plastic surgery,” as he struggles to care for soldiers maimed in World War I, it also chronicles the earliest moments of plastic surgery, honors the ongoing battles after war that Gillies’s patients endured, and demonstrates how reconstructive surgery is fundamentally an act of creativity, collaboration, and deep human empathy.

BOOK REVIEW - SKILL: 40 Principals That Surgeons, Athletes, and Other Elite Performers Use to Achieve Mystery

Author: Dr. Christopher S. Ahmad

Book Reviewer: Amy Lu

In SKILL, Dr. Christopher Ahmad delivers an insightful contribution to the literature of surgical education and performance science. Known as the head team physician for the New York Yankees and Chief of Sports Medicine at Columbia University, Dr. Ahmad brings a unique perspective as both an elite orthopedic surgeon and a trusted confidante to world-class athletes. With SKILL, he turns his attention to the process behind the outcome: how mastery is built, one principle at a time.

Book Review - The Beauty in Breaking: A Memoir

Book by Dr. Michele Harper
Review by Dr. Wissam Benhami

Book Review: Constipation Nation

Author: Dr. Carmen Fong, MD, FACS

Book Reviewer: Hannah Eng, OMS-IV

Book Review: What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear

Author: Danielle Ofri, MD

Book Reviewer: Sadie English

BOOK REVIEW

The Rules of Medicine: A Medical Professional's Guide for Success

by Dr. Sonya M. Sloan

Reviewer: Denise Nemeth, OMS4 

Book Review: Brave Boundaries by Sasha Shillcutt, M.D.

Reviewed by: Denise Nemeth, OMS III

You Are Not Broken

Author: Kelly Capserson, MD
Book Reviewer: Sarah Suhood, OMS III

Author Bio

“Become the Boss MD: Success Beyond Residency”

Author: Amy Vertrees

Book Reviewer: Denise Nemeth, OMS III

Behind Her Scalpel: A Practical Guide to Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery with Stories of Female Surgeons 

Authored and Edited by Cathy Hung, DDS

Dr. Cathy Hung is a board-certified oral and maxillofacial surgeon and a solo practice owner in New Jersey. She is a native of Taipei, Taiwan and came to the US alone at age eighteen on a student visa. She earned her BS in psychology with a minor in music from UC Berkeley and DDS from Columbia University. She received her OMFS training from Lincoln Medical and Mental Center in the Bronx, New York. She is an alumna of the American Dental Association’s Institute for Diversity in Leadership program. She is also a speaker, writer, and Certified Life Coach in cultural competency. She is an author, blogger, and selected member of Forbes’ Women Forum and Rebecca Minkoff’s Female Founders Collective.

"Letter to a Young Female Physician: Thoughts on Life and Work" by Dr. Suzanne Koven

Dr. Suzanne Koven begins her essay collection, “Letter to a Young Female Physician: Thoughts on Life and Work”, as one might expect – with a letter.[1] As she watches a crop of incoming interns write letters to their future selves, she reflects on her own career: the pressures she faced to prove herself, to value her skills, and to serve her patients well. This was in 2017, and it seems anecdotally that the call for reflection has come earlier and earlier in medical training in recent years. As a medical student (still a year away from intern orientation), I’ve participated in innumerable letter-writing exercises just like the one that inspired Dr. Koven. In this book, Dr. KoveN shows us why these reflections are so important. Dr. Koven describes a background caught between the arts and the sciences. As the daughter of an orthopedic surgeon, surrounded from an early age by men who practiced medicine, she always had an idea of the role of the doctor. Whether she saw herself in that role is a bit more complicated – in her book, she details the struggles that she felt in her early science courses, that science felt “unnatural” to her, despite her earning good grades. She attended Yale for college, where she studied English Literature. She then went on to Johns Hopkins for medical school and residency in primary care internal medicine, after which she joined Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital where she is now Writer-in-Residence.[2]

BOOK REVIEW: A Not Entirely Benign Procedure: Four Years as a Medical Student by Dr. Perri Klass

Reviewed by: Ariana Ginsberg

Letter to a Young Female Physician 

Book written by Dr. Suzanne Koven
Review provided by Charlotte B. Smith