From an exploration of cancer to a physician’s first-hand account of being a patient in intensive care, here are some must-read books for doctors in 2025. 

Coming March 18, 2025, Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green explores the scientific and social history of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Using the interwoven story of a young TB patient from Sierra Leone named Henry, Green explains how the disease has shaped the world, killing 1.5 million people a year despite treatment availability.

Coming April 8, 2025, No More Tears by Gardiner Harris is an exposé of one of the most trusted pharmaceutical companies in the United States, Johnson & Johnson. Written by an investigative journalist, the book is being called “explosive,” “shocking,” and “infuriating” and reveals the corruption that lies beneath adverts of babies smiling at bath time.

This just-released gem from Carl Zimmer explores the fascinating story of the air we breathe. From the hidden life floating inside the air to invisible dangers that have the power to change the world, Air-Borne (published February 25, 2025) takes us above the clouds, to mountain glaciers, and through the history of the aerobiologists who first tried to raise the alarm about airborne infections.

A compelling scientific narrative and a New York Times bestseller from Charan Ranganath, PhD, Why We Remember (published February 20, 2024) examines how memory works and provides tips for how to harness memory as a powerful tool. Ranganath weaves together practical science and notable studies to highlight the peculiarities of memory. It may just reshape the way you think.

Coming September 9, 2025, Protocols by Andrew Huberman, PhD, provides evidence-backed solutions to some of the most common life challenges. His series of protocols is designed to improve brain function and optimize mental and physical health and performance, all backed by scientific principles. His concept is being touted as the “roadmap for achieving optimal health.”

The physician, award-winning science writer, and researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee delves into the complex story of cancer. In The Emperor of All Maladies (published August 9, 2011) Mukherjee details centuries’ worth of discoveries, victories, setbacks, and deaths related to a disease that humans have lived with and died from for more than 5,000 years.

In Shock (published October 24, 2017) is a gripping memoir from Dr. Rana Awdish, an intensive care doctor who found herself nearly dying in her own hospital after suffering a catastrophic medical event at 7 months pregnant. Awdish recounts her experience in going from doctor to patient and her reckoning with seeing, for the first time, the dysfunction in her profession and her own practice as a physician. The book has been described as both a “roadmap” for patients navigating illness and a “call to arms” for doctors to see each patient as a human being, not a diagnosis.

In this award-winning book that inspired the Apple TV series, Sheri Fink, MD, PhD, investigates the fate of patients who died while stuck in a New Orleans hospital that was crippled by Hurricane Katrina. Five Days at Memorial (published September 10, 2013) is the result of 6 years of reporting by Fink, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for her article on these events that she published in The New York Times Magazine in 2009. Fink takes us inside the disaster response at the hospital over 5 days and confronts us with the decisions the medical staff had to make in prioritizing patients for evacuation—some of which were later alleged to be euthanasia. A doctor herself, Fink raises the question of the legal and ethical consequences of such decisions when made under conditions of crisis.