Robert Klitzman: 6 books

Kuru, like Mad Cow disease, is caused by a rare, infectious crystal protein that invades and colonizes human cells, destroying the nervous system of its victims. There is no known cure. It flourished in one of the remotest places on earth, Papua New Guinea, among the Fore, a people living in the Stone...

“A frank and compassionate account of his intern year in an unnamed hospital, told in prose as clean and precise and gleaming with promise as a surgeon’s scalpel. Klitzman emphasizes the human side of the hospital: the suffering and fragile mortality of patients; the frightening, funny, wearying...

Research on human beings saves countless lives, but has at times harmed the participants. To what degree then should government regulate science, and how? The horrors of Nazi concentration camp experiments and the egregious Tuskegee syphilis study led the US government, in 1974, to establish Research...

A psychiatric resident's firsthand account reveals his struggles with the homeless, suicidal, and paranoid, and his frustrations with hospital politics and the limitations of an inexact science. Fresh from medical school, Robert Klitzman began his residency in psychiatry with excitement and...

For many doctors, their role as powerful healer precludes thoughts of ever getting sick themselves. When they do, it initiates a profound shift of awareness-- not only in their sense of their selves, which is invariably bound up with the "invincible doctor" role, but in the way that they view their...

In the fifty years since DNA was discovered, we have seen extraordinary advances. For example, genetic testing has rapidly improved the diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as Huntington's, cystic fibrosis, breast cancer, and Alzheimer's. But with this new knowledge comes difficult decisions for...