When Doctors Near Aspen, London Witness the Impossible

The relationship between reading and healing has been explored by researchers across disciplines, from James Pennebaker's work on expressive writing at the University of Texas to the growing field of literary medicine. Pennebaker's landmark studies demonstrated that writing about traumatic experiences—and, by extension, engaging with narratives that address similar themes—produces measurable improvements in physical and psychological health, including enhanced immune function, reduced physician visits, and decreased symptoms of depression. In Aspen, London, England, "Physicians' Untold Stories" engages this therapeutic mechanism. Readers who encounter Dr. Kolbaba's extraordinary accounts are invited into a narrative process that mirrors the expressive writing paradigm: confronting death, loss, and mystery through story, and emerging with a more coherent, more hopeful understanding of their own experience.

Dr. Scott Kolbaba

About the Author

Dr. Scott J. Kolbaba, MD is an internist at Northwestern Medicine in Wheaton, Illinois. He interviewed more than 200 physicians about their most extraordinary experiences.

Book cover

Physicians' Untold Stories

by Scott J. Kolbaba, MD4.5 stars (1018 reviews)

Miraculous experiences doctors are hesitant to share with their patients, or ANYONE!

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Meant to awe, instruct, and inspire — stories that will convince even the harshest skeptic. — From the introduction to Physicians' Untold Stories

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Medical Fact

The human genome contains roughly 3 billion base pairs — if printed, it would fill about 262,000 pages.

Physician Burnout & Wellness Near Aspen, London

Physicians practicing in Aspen, London, England work at the intersection of modern medicine and experiences that resist explanation. In conversations that rarely leave the break room or the on-call suite, doctors in and around Aspen, London have reported encounters with phenomena that their training never prepared them for — from patients who describe verifiable details about events that occurred while they were clinically dead, to deathbed visions shared simultaneously by multiple family members, to recoveries that defy every prognostic model available.

The medical community in Aspen, London includes physicians across every stage of their careers — residents navigating the exhaustion of training, mid-career practitioners balancing clinical demands with family life, and veteran physicians carrying decades of experiences that challenge the boundaries of conventional medicine. Burnout touches all of them differently, but a common thread runs through: the desire to remember why they chose medicine in the first place, and the rare but profound moments that remind them.

Physician Burnout by Specialty

Percentage reporting at least one symptom (Medscape, 2024)

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Medical Fact

The human body maintains its temperature at 98.6°F (37°C), but recent studies suggest the average has dropped to about 97.9°F.

Faith, Medicine & the Unexplained in Aspen, London, England

The Midwest's tradition of bedside Bibles near Aspen, London, England—placed by the Gideons in hotel rooms and hospital nightstands since 1899—represents a passive faith-medicine intervention whose impact is impossible to quantify. The patient who opens a Gideon Bible at 3 AM during a sleepless, pain-filled night and finds comfort in the Psalms is receiving spiritual care delivered by a book placed there by a stranger who believed it would matter.

Scandinavian immigrant communities near Aspen, London, England brought a Lutheran tradition of sisu—a Finnish concept of inner strength and endurance—that shapes how patients approach illness and recovery. The Midwest patient who refuses pain medication, insists on walking the day after surgery, and apologizes for being a burden isn't being difficult. They're practicing a faith-inflected stoicism that their grandparents brought from Helsinki.

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Medical Fact

The body's immune system can distinguish between millions of different antigens — more variety than any library catalog.

Ghost Stories and the Supernatural Near Aspen, London, England

The Dust Bowl drove thousands of Midwesterners from their land, and the hospitals near Aspen, London, England that treated dust pneumonia patients carry the memory of that exodus. Respiratory therapists in the region describe occasional patients who cough up dust that shouldn't be in their lungs—fine, red-brown Oklahoma topsoil in the airway of a patient who has never left England. The land's memory enters the body.

Prairie isolation has always bred its own kind of ghost story, and hospitals near Aspen, London, England carry the loneliness of the Great Plains into their corridors. Night-shift nurses describe a silence so deep it has texture—and into that silence, sounds that shouldn't be there: the creak of a wagon wheel, the whinny of a horse, the footsteps of a homesteader who died alone in a sod house that became a clinic that became a hospital.

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Did You Know?

Hospitals are among the most haunted buildings in folklore worldwide — and the physician testimonies in this book suggest there may be a reason.

Near-Death Experiences Reported by Physicians Near Aspen, London

Midwest NDE researchers near Aspen, London, England benefit from a regional culture that values common sense over theoretical purity. While East Coast academics debate whether NDEs constitute evidence for consciousness surviving death, Midwest clinicians focus on the practical question: how does this experience affect the patient sitting in front of me? This pragmatic orientation produces research that is less philosophically ambitious but more clinically useful.

The University of Michigan's consciousness research program has produced findings that challenge the assumption that brain death means consciousness death. Physicians near Aspen, London, England who follow this research know that the EEG surge observed in dying brains—a burst of organized electrical activity in the final moments—may represent the physiological correlate of the NDE. The dying brain isn't shutting down; it's lighting up.

Near-Death Experience Features

Percentage reporting each feature (van Lommel et al., 2001)

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Did You Know?

The white coat ceremony, now held at nearly every U.S. medical school, was first introduced at Columbia University in 1993.

Watch Dr. Kolbaba Share These Stories

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Did You Know?

Dr. Kolbaba found that physicians who acknowledged the limits of medical science were often the most respected by their patients.

London: Where History, Medicine, and the Supernatural Converge

London's supernatural history spans nearly two millennia. The city is built on layer upon layer of the dead—Roman burial grounds, plague pits, and medieval cemeteries lie beneath its streets. Jack the Ripper's Whitechapel victims are said to haunt the East End, and the ghostly Grey Lady of Hampton Court Palace has been captured on CCTV. The Tube system is famously haunted, with reports of ghost trains and phantom passengers on the Northern, Bakerloo, and Piccadilly lines. Borley Rectory in Essex, once called 'the most haunted house in England' by paranormal investigator Harry Price, generated decades of public fascination. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882, was the world's first organization dedicated to the scientific study of paranormal phenomena and conducted rigorous investigations that laid the groundwork for modern parapsychology.

London has been a center of medical advancement for nearly a millennium. St. Bartholomew's Hospital, founded in 1123, is the oldest hospital in England still on its original site. The city is where Edward Jenner demonstrated his smallpox vaccine in 1796, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin at St. Mary's Hospital in 1928, and Florence Nightingale established modern nursing at St. Thomas' Hospital in 1860. The Royal College of Surgeons, founded in 1800, and the Royal College of Physicians, founded in 1518, continue to set standards for medical practice worldwide. London's medical schools have produced dozens of Nobel laureates and have been at the forefront of public health since John Snow traced a cholera outbreak to a Broad Street water pump in 1854.

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About the Book

Dr. Kolbaba completed his residency at both Rush Presbyterian-Saint Luke's Medical Center and the Mayo Clinic.

Notable Locations in London

The Tower of London: This 11th-century fortress is considered the most haunted building in England, with reported sightings of Anne Boleyn carrying her severed head, the Princes in the Tower, and Lady Jane Grey among its many ghosts.

The Langham Hotel: Opened in 1865, the Langham is considered London's most haunted hotel, with Room 333 being the epicenter of reported ghostly activity including a Victorian-era gentleman and a German prince who took his own life there.

Highgate Cemetery: This Victorian cemetery opened in 1839 became the center of the 'Highgate Vampire' panic in the 1970s, and visitors continue to report ghostly apparitions among its elaborate Gothic monuments and overgrown pathways.

The Old Operating Theatre Museum: Located in the attic of St. Thomas' Church in Southwark, this is the oldest surviving surgical theatre in Europe (1822), where visitors report hearing phantom screams and feeling the presence of patients who endured surgery without anesthesia.

St. Bartholomew's Hospital: Founded in 1123, 'Barts' is the oldest hospital in England still operating on its original site, and has been a center of medical education and innovation for nine centuries.

St. Thomas' Hospital: Founded in the 12th century, St. Thomas' is home to the Florence Nightingale Museum and the world's first professional nursing school, established by Nightingale in 1860 after her experiences in the Crimean War.

Royal London Hospital: Established in 1740, the Royal London was home to Joseph Merrick (the 'Elephant Man') and is one of the UK's leading trauma centers and teaching hospitals.

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About the Book

Dr. Kolbaba practices internal medicine at Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield, Illinois.

How This Book Can Help You

The book's honest treatment of physician doubt near Aspen, London, England will resonate with Midwest doctors who've been taught that certainty is a clinical virtue. These accounts reveal that the most important moments in a medical career are often the ones where certainty fails—where the physician must stand in the gap between what they know and what they've witnessed, and choose to speak honestly about both.

Physicians' Untold Stories book cover — by Dr. Scott J. Kolbaba, MD

Reader Ratings Distribution

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Research Finding

Bibliotherapy — prescribing books for mental health — has been shown to be as effective as face-to-face therapy for mild depression.

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Discover the Stories Medicine Never Says Out Loud

Physicians' Untold Stories by Scott J. Kolbaba, MD4.5 stars from 1018 readers.

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Physicians' Untold Stories by Dr. Scott Kolbaba

Amazon Bestseller

The Stories Medicine Never Told You

Over 200 physicians interviewed. 26 true stories of ghost encounters, near-death experiences, and miraculous recoveries that will change the way you think about life, death, and what lies beyond.

By Dr. Scott J. Kolbaba, MD — 4.5★ from 1,018 ratings on Goodreads