Pamela Nagami

Often, individuals who excel in their chosen career find a way to transform it into something that can be shared with a much wider population; one such individual is Dr. Pamela Nagami, an active physician focusing on infectious diseases and internal medicine, and a clinical associate professor with The Devid Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California - Los Angeles. She has taken her experiences and turned them into best-selling books that chronicle some of the most interesting cases she has encountered throughout her career.

Her first book, The Woman with the Worm in Her Head and Other True Stories of Infectious Disease, was published in 2002 and includes such stories as the titular case involving a tapeworm that is tunneling into her brain and causing motor skills impairment, one involving a young athlete who was bitten by an insect and ultimately became infected by a flesh-eating organism, and one whose case of the common chicken pox resulted in severe disfigurement. Her second text, Bitten: True Medical Stories of Bites and Stings, manages to be even more terrifying, providing the stories of a diabetic who awoke to find a rat eating two of his toes and a young girl that suffered weeks of pure exhaustion following a tick bite.

One of the reasons Nagami is so successful as an author is not the utter fascination she provides to the readers through her selection of cases, but the humanity she brings to each telling. She is a scientist, so much of the focus is on the clinical, scientific elements of what she encounters. But she also writes about the humanity behind the individuals: the challenges that individuals and families face, the frustration with not knowing the short- or long-term outcomes, and the fear that comes from simply not knowing what is wrong. In her work, Nagami is able to provide care and solace to these patients and their families; in her writing, she is able to convey these messages to the reader, making the stories that much more relatable and her books that much more effective.