The Sherlock Holmes of Non-Fiction Medical Writers

Medical diagnosis is detective work. In his book, The Family Who Couldn’t Sleep, D.T. Max unfolds a medical mystery of a noble Venetian family whose offspring suffered from fatal insomnia. Physician and New York Times columnist Lisa Sanders takes readers on a biweekly journey of medical investigation in the Diagnosis series, which inspired the hit T.V. series House MD. Academy Fellow Randi Hutter Epstein moderates a discussion with these two award-winning writers, exploring not only the mysteries behind diagnosis but the process of turning medical sleuthing into riveting narratives. 

About the Speakers

D.T. Max is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery, which Natalie Angier, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called “gripping, cleanly written, cannily plotted and elegantly educational.... The book brims with great tales." He also wrote Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, published in 2012, which was a New York Times bestseller. He lives in New Jersey.

Lisa Sanders is an internist on the faculty of Yale School of Medicine and teaches in the Primary Care Internal Medicine residency program there. In her spare time she writes the biweekly Diagnosis column for the New York Times Magazine. Her column was the inspiration for the hit television series House MD and she was an advisor for the show. She is the author of the New York Times best seller, Every Patient Tells a Story. Before Sanders came to medical school she was an Emmy award winning producer for CBS News. She is currently at work on a book on diagnostic error.

Randi Hutter Epstein, MD, MPH is a medical writer, adjunct professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a lecturer at Yale University.  She earned a BS from The University of Pennsylvania, M.S. from the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University; an MD.from Yale University School of Medicine, and an MPH from the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. Randi worked as a medical writer for the London bureau of The Associated Press and was the London bureau chief of Physicians’ Weekly. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, Parents, More, among other newspapers and magazines. Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank is her first book.