Twelve Patients

In the spirit of Oliver Sacks and the inspiration for the NBC drama New Amsterdam, this memoir from a Medical Director of Bellevue Hospital looks poignantly at patients' lives, highlighting the complex mind-body connection.

"As intensely involving as any scripted for a television medical drama." —The New York Daily News

Twelve Patients shows the plights of twelve very different patients—from dignitaries at the nearby UN, to supermax prisoners at Riker's Island, to illegal immigrants, and Wall Street tycoons.

Dr. Eric Manheimer is not only the medical director of the country's oldest public hospital—he is also a patient. As the book unfolds, the narrator is diagnosed with cancer and is forced to wrestle with the end of his own life even as he struggles to save the lives of others.

"This book is not only brilliant, it is deeply moving, and as socially and politically important as anything I have read over the past ten years." —James F. Gilligan, psychiatrist and author