By Joyce Deming, information services librarian, Golden Library

Ever since Anton Chekhov and Arthur Conan Doyle set pen to paper, readers have been fascinated with books written by and about doctors. Perhaps it's because we're offered an other-side-of-the-flimsy-curtain look at a world few of us will ever enter except as patients. Or maybe it's just heartening to know that those folks in the white coats are human, too. In either case, here are a few suggestions to get you started.

My own reading in the genre began with the book Doctors by Erich Segal of Love Story fame. It's the story of two childhood friends who enter Harvard Medical School in 1958. Although the technology is a little dated, it's a realistic portrayal of the harsh mental and physical demands of medical training. Of course, with this author, there's always a little romance thrown in. It's a moving and compelling story that still reads well 20 years later.

If the rigors of modern medical training aren't formidable enough, imagine facing your first cadaver dissection when the culture you were raised in forbids touching the dead. This is just one of the obstacles Lori Alvord faced as she studied to become the first Navajo woman surgeon. In her inspiring memoir, The Scalpel and the Silver Bear, Alvord describes how she was able to merge her high-tech medical skills with traditional Navajo healing principles to provide humane health care to all of her patients.

If like me, you faithfully watched episodes of ER even after all the best characters left the show, you'll enjoy Pamela Grim's book, Just Here Trying to Save a Few Lives. Grim is a no-nonsense emergency room physician as well as an engaging and compassionate storyteller. After burning out treating "addicts and idiots and drunks and psychotics" in an inner-city ER, Grim traveled to Nigeria and Bosnia with Doctors Without Borders, where she was confronted with a whole new set of harsh realities. The book is gritty, brutally honest, yet impossible to put down.

The physician as philosopher and essayist is not a new idea, which the works of Lewis Thomas, Oliver Sacks and Richard Selzer will attest. If you enjoy thoughtful explorations on a medical theme, you don't want to miss Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science and Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, both by Atul Gawande. In addition to being a surgeon at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston and an assistant professor at Harvard, Dr. Gawande is a staff writer for The New Yorker, in which many of these essays first appeared. It's medical writing at its best.

You can check out these books and more at any Jefferson County Public Library location. Look for them on our website at http://jefferson.lib.co.us, or talk to your librarian for more recommendations.