Customer Reviews

The Woman with a Worm in Her Head: And Other True Stories of Infectious Disease

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

OK, first my prejudice--I am a resident physician working in the hospital where Dr. Nagami spends most of her professional time in recent years. She volunteers her time to teach me and my colleagues about infectious disease as well as her other specialties, internal medicine and geriatrics. She is brilliant in every way a resident would like an attending to be--knowledgable, insightful, out-going, pleasant, extraordinarily respectful of everyone around her, funny and overflowing with stories of her invaluable experiences.

That said I love her book. It helps that I recognize many of the characters. It helps, too, that I can hear her voice as I read it (partly because she has read excerpts to us on rounds). It is, nonetheless, an inspiring, touching, and, yes, educational work. Oh, and even though physicians who read it will find it educational that does not mean that it is in any way outside comprehension of other readers. I was tempted to skim past some of the short, plain language explanations aimed at the lay reader, but found even those sections to be helpful to the flow of the text. Not condescending, not verbose--just part of the story.

This is a wonderful book I would recommend to anyone. Sure it has particular appeal to those with special interest in health-related issues, it is also a pleasant look at humanism and spirituality.

Thanks, Dr. Nagami.

Dr. Pamela Nagami M.D.'s Maneater is one of the most fascinating books I've read as a med student, and one of the most captivating reads I've had in a long time. Her detailed explanation of various diseases that so many people are ignorant of was more intriguing and exciting than any lecture I've ever attended. I highly recommend it not only to the curious med student, but anyone who wants to learn how the simplest actions in life can prove to be the most deadly.

My girlfriend gave me this book because of my interest in medicine. I expected to find a dry account of several cases of diseases, but what I got instead was a gripping account of one inspirational doctor's career in the dangerous field of infectious diseases. Dr. Nagami not only lets you inside her field, but also inside her head as you read what it is like to make life-and-death decisions on a daily basis. The tales were shocking, but also extremely informative and exciting. This reads almost like a detective novel, with Dr. Nagami searching for the invaders that are ruining her patients' bodies. An overall excellent book that will keep you entertained for hours.

If you like medicine and the human condition but never really wanted to be a doctor, this is a book you will enjoy. Pamela Nagami is an infectious disease expert and brings her full experience to bear as we see in each of the mini cases she writes about in this book.

If you enjoy Oliver Sacks' books such as "Awakenings" or "The Island of the Color Blind", you will enjoy Pamela Nagami. Dr. Nagami also has a newer book out "Bitten: True Medical Stories of Bites and Stings" that is equally as compelling.

A good friend recommended this book as both an unusual yet impossible to put down biography. She was correct. Dr. Nagami describes what life is like for a doctors who work with the diseases other doctors don't want to, or know how to treat. Stuff like flesh eating strep, wild parasites and worms, chickenpox etc. This is truly one of the best bio's I've had my hands on because Dr. Nagami not only describes the guts and glory of her work but details an unusual human side to life in the diseased world. Her perspective was very different from what I had guessed. This book makes you think about life.

This book is an amazing compilation of stories that will intrigue and fascinate you. Written from a very human and touching perspective by an infectious disease specialist, Maneater kept me entertained up until the very last paragraph. I would recommend this to anyone interested in diseases, medicine, health, or anyone just looking for a great read.

Dr. Nagami offers detailed case histories of patients that survived infectious diseases by clearly educating the general reader with a writing style that reads like fiction. Each case is fascinating and provides a glimpse in to the medical world that is not often revealed by a practicing physician. Dr. Nagami clearly is devoted to her field of medicine and to her patients.

This is certainly a well-written book about rare infectious diseases and rare manifestations of ordinary diseases. The author exhibits great feeling for the critically ill patients she cares for, as well as their problems and social difficulties. But this is not a book remotely like the works of Paul deKruif, Deborah Hayden, Berton Rouche, and others. The author is NOT a journalist or an academic researcher. She is a front-line clinician, which leads her to bring a depth of personal feeling (and tragedy) to these stories that is quite lacking from most tales of medical triumphs and tragedies.

Unfortunately, medical science is moving much more rapidly than such feeling case histories (spanning a lifetime of service) can make it to the public (even the limited audience for this book). This means the cases are true to the historical state of medical technology and present occasional questions to an informed reader. To her credit, Ms. Nagami pulls no punches about the fact that many of her expiring patients die from iatrogenic effects of their treatment, rather than the original disease. Similarly, although she points out where historical errors were made in diagnosis and treatment, the less obvious mistakes which only became apparent in retrospect due to the continuing development of medical technology necessarily go unrecognized in her book. (If it remains in print for a long time it could be updated.) She also tells of a few obvious instances of inadequate or marginally competent medical care, but lets them pass without judgmental comment.

In short, this is a very unusual book. Few clinicians have enough time to write for a popular audience. She achieves her objective of making the reader aware of medical dangers they may not have thought of, but 2/3 or more of these dangers are consequential to medical treatment of the presenting condition, a subject which some might think deserved more inquiry. These moving tales are basically stories of a presenting condition, the horrors it produces, and the problems of treating the condition using methods that (necessarily) may prove as deadly as the original, especially if you contracted it in the ICU.

I used the various chapters in this book to supplement materials in the High School Medical Careers Course I teach. For example, when we studied about the different types of blood cells, students read the story about a patient with a very high eosinophil count who had just returned from Vietnam and had a parasitic worm infection. Eosinophils originally evolved to fight helminth (worm) infections, though in the US, where worms are uncommon, a high count more commonly represents an allergic reaction. Students loved the story and it also exposed them to another culture.

Dr. Nagami tells a facinating story. Her knowledge in the area of infectious disease if vast and her ability to tell the stories behind each disease is a true gift. The people in this book were brought to life with her page-turning prose and she made difficult and complex diseases easy to understand.

When I started to read this book I had no idea that I would not be able to put it down. Several hours later, bleary-eyed, I finished and knew that I had found a terrific holiday gift for several of my friends. I have the book sitting in my living room and many people have picked it up, started reading and asked if they could borrow it. This book is a facinating must-read.