Christine Montross

Montross' first book, Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab, is a memoir of her time as a medical student. She wrote it during her first year at Brown.[5] A major theme of Body of Work is the reactions of Montross and her student colleagues to their first dissection of a human corpse, which they nickname "Eve".[6][7] More broadly, Montross also discusses the history of anatomy, including her visit to Padua to see the laboratory where Andreas Vesalius performed the dissections which led to his influential work on human anatomy, De humani corporis fabrica.[8] Montross appeared on C-SPAN's Q&A for an interview with Brian Lamb about the book.[9] Rachel Hartigan Shea of the Washington Post praised Body of Work as "a beautiful book" which "offers of a place off limits to anyone without Montross's clearsighted courage", while Katie Roiphe of the New York Times Book Review named it an Editor's Choice.[6][10]

Montross received the MacColl Johnson Fellowship in 2010, and used the award money to conduct research in Paris on the origins of psychiatric treatment and to begin work on a collection of poetry, which she tentatively titled Lunacy and Light.[11] That project eventually evolved into Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis, a nonfiction work which introduces the reader to a variety of mental disorders through a series of case studies of individual patients who suffer from those disorders.[12][13][14] These profiles are interspersed with anecdotes from Montross' domestic life. One reviewer, fellow psychiatrist Arjune Rama, praised these portions of the book, stating that "during these personal passages I felt I was reading not just about the practice of psychiatry, but rather the practice of being a psychiatrist"; however, Julia Klein of the Boston Globe described this as a "weakness" of the book and criticized these passages as "tacked on".[15][16]

Montross used her 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship grant award to begin work on a third book about mentally ill people in United States jails and prisons, tentatively titled Acquainted With the Night: Mental Illness in America's Prisons.[17][18] In the course of her research, she studied a number of correctional institutions both in the United States and abroad, including the Cook County Jail in Chicago and Halden Prison in Norway.[19] She presented "On Revenge", a chapter from the book discussing the role of punishment in the criminal justice systems of various countries, in a June 2017 lecture at Dartmouth College's Leslie Center for the Humanities.[20]