Heal Your Brain
(non-fiction)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press, describes the 6 main principles of the New Neuropsychiatry, which can help achieve better outcomes in the treatment of depression and anxiety disorders.
"Dr. Hellerstein's achievement is remarkable: he gives patients and their loved ones a clear and concise road map of the best that modern psychiatry has to offer, weaving the latest brain science with clinical wisdom. Not everyone will be lucky enough to have Dr. Hellerstein as their psychiatrist. The good news is that they can buy his book."
(Richard A. Friedman, M.D., Weill Cornell Medical College)
A Family of Doctors
(memoir)
A history of American medicine as seen through 5 generations of doctors in one American family.
"In this poignant, deeply moving book, Dr. David Hellerstein traces five generations of American medicine--from the Civil War to the present day--as seen through the eyes of his unforgettable family."
(Sherwin Nuland, MD, Author of How We Die)
"Rewarding reading...an artful blend of medical history and family memoir." (Kirkus Reviews)
"Remarkable...genuinely moving" (Plain Dealer)
Books
Loving Touches
(novel)
A comic first novel by an author known for his powerful and moving accounts of medical training, Loving Touches is set in 1990s New York. The story explores the love Dr. Pete Roth feels for two very different women: his wife Sarah, a Wall Street lawyer, and Celine Walters, a former girlfriend who has been admitted to the hospital where he works. First year psychiatric resident Dr. Pete Roth is torn between his love for his wife and Celine, a seemingly fragile graduate student with whom Pete had an affair two summers earlier.
Stone Babies
(novel)
Stone Babies is a black comedy about the practice of medicine today. Having just finished training as an infertility specialist, Dr. Jay Sones looks forward to opening a lucrative private practice in Manhattan. Just as his new life begins, disaster strikes. His partner is attacked and nearly killed, and he is caught up in a vicious malpractice suit. To make ends meet, Sones starts work at a hospital in the South Bronx. Stone Babies is at once a thriller, a love story, and a black comedy about medicine in America today.
David J. Hellerstein, MD
Battles of Life and Death
(essays)
A collection of 13 award-winning essays about medical school and residency training.
“Battles of Life and Death is a unique, beautifully written account of the making of a doctor. In place of the conventional studio portrait of a heroic, miracle-working wizard, David Hellerstein gives us candid pictures of a human being forced to confront, hour after hour, his own weakness and mortality in the weakness and mortality of others. He records, with an honesty that must humble the reader, his occasional evasions and failures of nerve in the face of those confrontations and the partial nature of the victories he wins. Battles of Life and Death is a remarkable document--dramatic, moving and true.” -- Tobias Wolff, author of Back in the World [about the hardcover edition, Houghton Mifflin Publishers]
“Emotionally riveting...the writing is taut, accurate and unsentimental. And entertaining as well. -- Newsday