Most people don't know they even take place. Now, "Monday Mornings," a novel by Sanjay Gupta -- CNN's chief medical correspondent and a practicing neurosurgeon at Atlanta's Emory University -- lifts the veil on these gatherings.

While driving one of his three daughters to school last week, Gupta, 42, talked to Salon about his bestselling first novel, how doctors can do better, and the controversial ethics of being both journalist and physician.

What made you decide to leap into fiction?

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It was the kind of question adults rarely pose. But Abigail (a pseudonym, like some other names in this piece) is 8, and she doesn't have any qualms about being direct. The person she was asking, my daughter Beatrice, likewise didn't hesitate in her reply.

Abigail is new to our school this year. She is in every way a typical second-grader, except that she was born without a left hand. It's a trait that makes her undeniably noticeable, and so, sometimes, people ask questions. Sometimes Abigail has questions of her own. Sometimes, when you're different, you want to know.

When Bea told me what Abigail had inquired about a few weeks ago, I'd winced a little, wondering how my child had answered. Had she passed whatever test Abigail was giving? I know how frank Bea can be, how she walks behind me when we're out in public, checking whether the shiny, taut expanse of bare skin on my scalp is visible. "Mom, your bald spot," she'll say when we're in a restaurant, fussing with locks to try to hide the five-centimeter circle where, a year and a half ago, I had surgery to remove cancer.

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For the first time in sixteen years, Andrew has stopped taking the psychotropic medications his psychiatrist father prescribed after ten-year-old Andrew caused an accident that rendered his mother a paraplegic. Like the illegal drugs his high school buddies take, Andrew’s meds serve as a metaphor for the feelings of inadequacy, disappointment and rootlessness endemic to my generation of twenty-somethings. Judging from the film’s cult-hit success, its target audience of my peers apparently found the metaphor apt. When Andrew falls in love with a quirky, vibrant girl he meets in a doctor’s waiting room, she shows him how to reengage with his feelings—and the world. Presumably, he leaves the medications behind.

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“Tinderbox,” an insightful new book from a journalist and an AIDS researcher, tells the story of the epidemic from its birth in colonial Congo — where it lingered undetected for decades — to its sudden spread around the globe in the 1980s, to its status today as the object of a global public health war directed from Washington and Geneva and targeting Africa, home to some 70 percent of all AIDS cases today.

Narrating this disturbing tale are Craig Timberg, former South Africa bureau chief for the Washington Post, and Daniel Halperin, an epidemiologist, AIDS researcher and former advisor to the U.S. government’s anti-AIDS program. Timberg met Halperin in the middle of his five-year stint as the Post’s Johannesburg bureau chief and the two began exploring questions that had bothered Timberg since his arrival in South Africa.

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Thirty years later, Davidson is still researching and writing about the intersection of neuroscience and emotion -- he currently teaches psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In his new book, written with Sharon Begley, “The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live, and How You Can Change Them,” Davidson lays out a fascinating theory that parses out emotional style into six dimensions, giving readers a better understanding of where they stand on this emotional plane and how emotional styles affect the qualities of their everyday lives.

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In his new book, "The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care," Eric Topol, a former professor and researcher at the University of Michigan and Case Western University, and chief academic officer for Scripps Health, a nonprofit healthcare system based in San Diego, argues that the digital revolution can democratize our medical system. Topol demonstrates how the digital revolution can be used to change individual care and  prevention, and even the economics of American healthcare. From cellphones that automatically collect medical data, to biosensors, advanced imaging, individualized prescriptions and gene-specific drugs, Topol's book leads readers through science-fiction-sounding scenarios that may soon be a reality.

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A dear friend of many years has a kidney disease and will likely need a new kidney within a year or face dialysis or worse. She hasn't had any luck being on the organ list.

I said that I would donate a kidney to her if we are a match. But now I'm realizing that I am actually very uncomfortable with the idea. I hate doctors and hospitals, and the idea of surgery except in the most dire circumstances freaks me out. Also, I think there's a reason everyone has two kidneys; it's not just a spare part.

I like to do things that are stressful to the kidneys such as drink coffee, get drunk now and then, trip on plants that are metabolized by the kidneys and liver (this is part of my spiritual practice). Do I say nothing and hope that, come March when she's testing possible donors, we are not a match? Or do I strain the friendship by admitting to her that I have misgivings about my promise?

Willing Initially

Dear Willing Initially,

You did a good thing. You offered to help.

You may or may not be a compatible donor. But you said these words out of a genuine spirit of generosity and kindness. This is a pretty amazing thing about human beings -- that we are inclined toward helping each other. It's a good thing.

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Open "The Art of Medicine: Over 2,000 Years of Images and Imagination" (University of Chicago Press, out now), which spotlights works from London's Wellcome Collection, and you'll find illuminations from late medieval medical manuals; 18th-century anatomical waxworks with removable organs; leaves from hand-colored plant and herb guides; early-20th-century lithographs advertising gout remedies; astonishing close-ups of implanting human embryos; and much, much more. The collection is so wide-ranging and diverse as to defy a pithy explanation -- but taken as a whole, it's transfixing.

Emma Shackleton, one of the book's co-authors, answered a few of my questions over email; the accompanying slide show offers a whirlwind tour of the past few hundred years of medical imagery.

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Kossut had no idea, but in the spring of last year, he was looking for something, anything, that might improve his mental state. In 2008, he was diagnosed with cancer of the tonsils and put on a biweekly chemo and radiation regimen. He quickly lost his appetite, dropped weight and sank into a deep depression. When a friend sent him a news brief about the experimental NYU study, he applied.

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Over the last few decades in the U.S., the paternalism of the medical establishment has begun to crumble and patients have been given more and more power in deciding their own treatment for everything from cancer to disk pain. As a result, it's increasingly becoming important to understand why certain people make, for example, the choice to eschew chemotherapy in their cancer treatment while others make it their first choice.

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A judge ultimately dismissed the case, stating that "the court does not find defamatory meaning, but rather a sometimes emotional discussion of the issues." But it's not the first time a physician filed a suit against a consumer for a bad Internet review -- and probably won't be the last. A physician's reputation is all he or she has, and a sour review on the Web can make us very anxious.

Online review sites, of course, are imperfect and open to manipulation. But we all head to Google nevertheless in search of information and advice, whether we're shopping for a book or a new physician. So how do you know whether the doctor you're seeing is any good? And how do I know how good a doctor I am?

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Now for the bad news: At some point the Huffington Post's gloriously deranged "Living" section was replaced by "Aol Health Living." It still has Deepak Chopra, but there seems, upon a cursory perusal, to be a lot less "integrative medicine" and all-natural holistic cure-alls peddled by Hollywood quacks. It looks like anti-vaccine nut Jenny McCarthy last contributed to the HuffPo way back in January.

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I'm writing because I respect you and the work you do. I have reached the end of my rope and don't know who else I can turn to for an honest answer. (My friends and family have been wonderful, but I sense that after years of advising and supporting me, they no longer know what to say.)

I am 35, unmarried and I live alone. I have had a rough past, which through years of therapy and dedicated hard work I have come to terms with. Unfortunately, I do bear one significant scar -- I suffer from mental illness. Diagnosis: bipolar with psychosis and PTSD. It runs in my family and is currently managed with a remarkable cocktail that has kept me relatively stable for many years.

The problem is this: I have big dreams for my life. Really big dreams, dreams bigger than healthy people should even have. And I am actively working toward those dreams. I take advantage of the myriad of opportunities I've been afforded, I seem to be naturally lucky, and I am a dogged, diligent worker. However, after any period of stress I become ill. Not necessarily mentally ill -- I've learned to manage my state of mind pretty well. But I become physically ill. Though it is typically reserved for the much younger, I got mono this year. I'm currently recovering from a sinus infection because I'm in an intensive language program. I do directly correlate the two, because I was also here last year and spent several weeks sick with the same thing.

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Nodding syndrome exclusively afflicts children -- usually between the ages of 5 and 15 -- inhibiting "both physical growth and cognitive development," according to Nature's Meredith Wadman. The malady is most clearly visible in the eponymous seizures it causes: "Abnormal brain activity causes a brief lapse in neck muscle tone, causing the head to fall forwards." In short, victims freeze up, except for their bobbing heads, sometimes for seconds, sometimes longer.

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Colloquially known as "the clap," gonorrhea is a bacterial infection that afflicts some 700,000 Americans annually. The bug can lead to all sorts of painful and damaging symptoms in a host's nether regions, sometimes leading to infertility in both men and women. It can also increase the chances of HIV transmission, kidney failure, meningitis and a host of other complications. In extreme cases, it can lead to death. Cephalospirins, a class of antibiotics, have been the standard (not to mention the only effective) treatment for the disease since the 1940s. But genetic mutations in one strain of the bacteria, called H041, have rendered the treatment ineffective in some patients.

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Majority Leader Harry Reid called on Republicans to take any cuts to Medicare benefits "off the table."

The Nevada Democrat spoke just minutes after Vice President Joe Biden convened another meeting with top lawmakers on finding spending cuts to accompany legislation allowing the government to continue to borrow to finance its operations and avoid defaulting on U.S. bonds.

Republicans are pressing for savings from the rapidly growing Medicare program, but Democrats stand adamantly against proposals to raise the eligibility age for the program, require wealthier seniors to pay more for Medicare or boosting copayments for visits to doctors and hospitals.

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A little private time is common in consultations with teens; it gives them the opportunity to be honest about various behaviors, including sexual activity, that they wouldn't discuss in front of their parents. CDC statistics show a third of girls in the U.S. are sexually active by age 15, so these talks can make the difference between a teenage girl staying healthy by practicing safe sex, and becoming a star on the next season of "16 and Pregnant."

The MTV show has generated a lot of controversy because of the way the mothers and mothers-to-be on the program behaved after they'd decided to have a child. But, for a pediatrician like me, the show raises a different question: Did these young women have the chance to talk privately with their doctors before MTV started shooting their second trimester?

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Doctors were once overwhelmingly male and usually owned their own practices. They generally favored lower taxes and regularly fought lawyers to restrict patient lawsuits. Ronald Reagan came to national political prominence in part by railing against "socialized medicine" on doctors' behalf.

But doctors are changing. They are abandoning their own practices and taking salaried jobs in hospitals, particularly in the North, but increasingly in the South as well. Half of all younger doctors are women, and that share is likely to grow.

There are no national surveys that track doctors' political leanings, but as more doctors move from business owner to shift worker, their historic alliance with the Republican Party is weakening from Maine as well as South Dakota, Arizona and Oregon, according to doctors' advocates in those and other states.

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