Better, by Atul Gawande. Gawande’s National Book Award-nominated first book, Complications, was an account of the challenges facing doctors as they try to diagnose and treat the myriad diseases that can invade the fragile human ecosystem. In this book, he focuses on how doctors can improve their performance, identifying three key essentials to becoming better. As he does, we learn how the life expectancy of cystic fibrosis patients has risen from age 3 to the mid-40s, how India, almost exclusively using volunteers, inoculates millions of children against polio, and how the treatment of war injuries has reduced the mortality rate from 1 in 2 in the U.S. Civil War to 1 in 10 in Iraq. Gawande’s account reminds us of how well our often-maligned health systems can work, and how full they are of people trying to make them – better.

Crashing Through: A Story of Risk, Adventure, and the Man Who Dared to See, by Robert Kurson. Blinded in a childhood accident, Mike May never hesitated to try anything—until the day an ophthalmologist told him a new stem-cell and cornea transplant could restore his vision. How he faced that decision and its aftermath make up this book.

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, by Steven Johnson. Cholera is one of history’s greatest killers, and as Europe’s cities grew in the 19th century, cholera epidemics spread and claimed more victims than ever before. This book tells the story of how a physician, a demographer and a clergyman solved the mystery of cholera’s spread in an 1854 London epidemic, and how their work convinced skeptical city officials to establish modern sewer systems, still in existence today, that provided a public health model for the world.

Hospital: Man. Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God and Diversity on Steroids, by Julie Salamon. This book spotlights Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., conducting a behind-the-scenes tour of the modern hospital, showing how doctors and administrators juggle the budgets, politics and personalities that drive this complex machine, one built with both high tech and high touch.

How Doctors Think, by Jerome Groopman. On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within 18 seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment—which may be correct, but also may not. Groopman explores the cognitive errors that can lead doctors to make medical mistakes, and advises patients on how they can help their doctors avoid them by communicating effectively and asking mind-opening questions.

Intern: A Doctor's Initiation, by Sandeep Jauhar. Sandeep, now head of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, recalls his stressful and uncertain days as an intern, as he coped with doubts about his chosen vocation, his lack of skill and its consequences, and the fatigue, both mental and physical, inherent in the training. One review called this book required reading for anyone seriously considering a career in medicine.

The Uncertain Art: Thoughts on a Life in Medicine, by Sherwin B. Nuland. Nuland, a National Book Award winner, urges his colleagues toward introspection and self-awareness, stressing that doctors make life-and-death decisions based on their own emotions, strengths, insecurities and needs. In these essays, he meditates on the uncertainty inherent in the art of medicine, the need to bring the humanities into a medical education he sees as too focused on technology, and the limits to a physician’s authority and responsibility.

Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver, by Arthur Allen. Vaccines are one of the most important yet most controversial achievements in public health. Allen’s even-handed history of how vaccines were developed and used describes the good that vaccines have done and the problems that vaccination faces. Vaccines have never been safer, he says, but also never has the public been so skeptical about their efficacy and safety.