Common Read

In Rough Sleepers, Kidder tells the story of Dr. Jim O’Connell, a gifted man who invented a community of care for a city’s unhoused population, including those who sleep on the streets – the “rough sleepers.”

After Jim O’Connell graduated from Harvard Medical School and was nearing the end of his residency at Massachusetts General, the hospital’s chief of medicine made a proposal: Would he defer a prestigious fellowship and spend a year helping to create an organization to bring health care to homeless citizens? That year turned into O’Connell’s life’s calling. Tracy Kidder spent five years following Dr. O’Connell and his colleagues as they work with thousands of homeless patients, some of whom we meet in this illuminating book. We travel with O’Connell as he navigates the city streets at night, offering medical care, socks, soup, empathy, humor, and friendship to some of the city’s most endangered citizens. He emphasizes a style of medicine in which patients come first, joined with their providers in what he calls “a system of friends.”

Much as he did with Paul Farmer in Mountains Beyond Mountains, Kidder explores how Jim O’Connell and a dedicated group of people have improved countless lives by facing and addressing one of American society’s most difficult problems, instead of looking away.

About the author
Tracy Kidder has been described by The Baltimore Sun as “a master of the nonfiction narrative.” Tracy Kidder has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Award, among other literary prizes. His books include Mountains Beyond Mountains, Strength in What Remains, The Soul of a New Machine, House, Among Schoolchildren, Old Friends, Hometown, Good Prose, and A Truck Full of Money.

As the American born daughter of immigrants, Dr. Sunita Puri knew from a young age that the gulf between her parents’ experiences and her own was impossible to bridge, save for two elements: medicine and spirituality. Between days spent waiting for her mother, an anesthesiologist, to exit the OR, and evenings spent in conversation with her parents about their faith, Puri witnessed the tension between medicine’s impulse to preserve life at all costs and a spiritual embrace of life’s temporality. And it was that tension that eventually drew Puri, a passionate but unsatisfied medical student, to palliative medicine–a new specialty attempting to translate the border between medical intervention and quality-of-life care.

Interweaving evocative stories of Puri’s family and the patients she cares for, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour is a stunning meditation on impermanence and the role of medicine in helping us to live and die well, arming readers with information that will transform how we communicate with our doctors about what matters most to us.

About the author
Sunita Puri is a writer of memoir and nonfiction, as well as a palliative medicine physician and the Program Director of the Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship at the University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center. She is gifted in the art of finding compassionate ways to discuss life and death.

Catastrophic Rupture tells the story of Dr. Lee, a bioethics and critical care trained pediatrician who has cared for many children with neurodevelopmental disabilities. When a complicated delivery resulted in a severe brain injury for her second child, she found that her life as a parent was more challenging and ultimately richer than she could have imagined. This book allows the reader to walk alongside the author as she struggles to bond with and love her child, as she reconciles what is happening at home with her ongoing role as a physician to patients and families in similar circumstances, and as she shifts from the medical perspective of disability that sees an impaired body to the mother’s perspective that sees the beauty and value in the person that is her child.

Know My Name is the first person account of Chanel Miller, a victim of sexual assault. She brilliantly describes the coping and aftermath of this life altering experience – inviting the reader deep into the psyche of a recovering victim. It is bold and unapologetic, important, and incredibly timely. Know My Name initiated a conversation that is very much needed, not only at MCW, but in the medical community as a whole.

Your Heart is the Size of Your Fist: A Doctor Reflects on Ten Years at a Refugee Clinic touches on several themes throughout the book, including cultural humility, trauma and health systems and policy. Use the questions in the PDF to help guide your discussion of the book.

Dr. Martina Scholtens spent a decade in a Vancouver, British Columbia clinic for newly-arrived refugees, providing health care for families from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. But her real mission – the challenge that shines through her fascinating book – was to accompany them on their journeys in ways that went far beyond what she learned in medical school or during her family medicine residency.

The author's visit was cancelled due to the impact of COVID-19 and in accordance with MCW's event guidelines.

It was with great excitement that we announced the selection of Dr. Rana Awdish’s novel, In Shock, as our first MCW Common Read during the 2018-2019 school year. In Shock was recommended to the Common Read Steering Committee by Dr. Cassie Ferguson. Dr. Ferguson is a Pediatric Emergency Medicine doctor by day (and night), Director of the Kern Student Pillar, Director of the QuIPS Scholarly Pathway, and a driving force behind the MCW Common Read. In Shock follows Dr. Awdish’s journey through a life-threatening medical emergency and its aftermath. Throughout the course of her story, she flips the lens on the medical system and balks at the gaps in caring and compassion. She also expertly reflects on her own training and seeks answers for the dissonance that exists between her training and her actual experiences. Themes of caring, competence, and character weave in and out of this purposely raw novel, demanding that readers take a critical look at themselves.

In August 2018, a group of MCW students, faculty, and staff came together with the goal of uniting our institutional community through a Common Read program. Each academic year, a book will be selected that exemplifies the integration of innovation, reflection, academic discourse and critical thinking. Selected books will be framed by formal and informal events, allowing for engagement with the subject matter in meaningful ways that enrich the reader’s experience. The MCW Common Read Program strives to provide a foundation for conversations around change, compassion, caring and character. The program culminates annually with a keynote speech given by the book’s author or a representative who can to speak to the themes raised within the chosen book.

It is our distinct hope that each year, and with each new Common Read selection, our boundaries blur a bit more and that students find themselves connecting with residents, faculty with patients, staff with trainees, Green Bay third-year medical students with Milwaukee first-year medical students, and so on. Thank you for being interested, thank you for engaging, thank you for listening and thank you for reading.

A final thanks to all the people who made this program possible:

MCW Common Read Founder: Olivia Davies

Founding Members: Sarah Benett, Dr. Aurther Derse, Dr. Cassie Ferguson, Dr. Fletcher, Sehr Khan, Scott Lamm, Sophia Lindekugel, Ashley Ng, Dr. Ann Maguire, Dr. Martin Muntz, Gerilyn Olsen, Dr. Wendy Peltier, Zoe Retzlaff, Liz Suelzer

MCW Common Read Logo Creator: Rushi Patel

MCW Common Read Support: MCW Dean of Medicine Office