Kate Scannell

Kate Scannell MD is a physician and author, who lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is currently enjoying time to write the medical mysteries she has longed to tell.

“Immortal Wounds—A Doctor Nora Kelly Mystery"—is the first in her current series involving crack diagnostician Dr. Nora Kelly and her colleagues at fictional Oakland City Hospital (September, 2018). We begin the series on a normal workday with Nora—as normal as it can be after the traumatic loss of her family two years ago. She steps into the ER, struggling with grief and self-doubt about her ability to continue practicing medicine. Early retirement, at age fifty-seven, increasingly appeals. But there’s a corpse waiting in the administrative suite, and havoc descends upon her and her colleagues. The mystery behind the mayhem draws Nora back into life and work, and her once-renowned diagnostic acumen resurrects under extreme peril. At the same time, her self-redemptive quest to solve the mystery unearths a deeply personal and painful question, one that reaches into the core of who she is and what she believes.

The second-in-series, "Lethal Control," was published in September, 2021. Nora is stunned when an anonymous blue patient is abandoned at Oakland City Hospital's ER. Several other patients with baffling systemic symptoms appear, and Nora and her colleagues begin to suspect environmental toxins as the cause. To prove that and safeguard others in the community, she must outwit a powerful corporate adversary. Themes of environmental justice, homelessness, human trafficking, and immigration run through the mystery.

In "Double Fault," the third-in-series, published in December 2024, Dr. Nora Kelly is shocked and perplexed when she loses a young patient during a seemingly routine surgery. And while the cause for his death remains unclear, she is blamed for it by his devastated and litigious parents, a hostile colleague with a covert agenda, and social media commentators who publicly demonize her. To survive the nightmare, Nora must solve the mystery of the puzzling death. Her quest requires her to navigate tricky entanglements with her hostile colleague and an estranged mentor, and to break through the parents' wall of secrecy.

Kate Scannell has published extensively in both lay and professional venues. She was also a regular opinion columnist (2000-2014; 2018-2020) for several Bay Area newspapers and their digital outlets, including “The Oakland Tribune,” the “San Jose Mercury News,” and "The East Bay Times." Her columns explored the ethical and sociopolitical dimensions of modern medicine and health care.

In 1999, she published her memoir “Death of the Good Doctor—Lessons from the Heart of the AIDS Epidemic” (Cleis Press). The memoir recounts her experiences serving as the medical director for one of the country's first hospital AIDS wards during the early HIV epidemic years (1985-1990) when most patients suffered quick deaths. It also conveys her coming-of-age as a woman physician during this unique time. After the memoir went out of print, she acquired its rights and published it in digital (2010) and paperback formats (2012; and, 2018 with photos).

Kate also wrote the novel “Flood Stage,” a collection of twenty interrelated stories about people living in a diverse rural community in Northern California whose lives are upturned while torrential rains overfill the local river. When flood stage arrives and apocalyptic flooding ensues, residents of this tight-knit community must make swift and painful decisions. Do they stay or flee? What do they choose to carry away, what do they leave behind? In moments of urgent reckoning, their unique personal histories are acted out on center stage while a universal human trauma unfolds.

Kate loves medicine and patient care. She was board certified in Internal Medicine; Rheumatology; Geriatrics; and, Hospice and Palliative Medicine. She intends to stay close to her medical interests through future writing.