Lisa Sanders

Lisa Sanders (born July 24, 1956) is an American physician, medical author and journalist, and associate professor of internal medicine and education at Yale School of Medicine. In 2002, she began writing a column for The New York Times called Diagnosis, which covered medical mystery cases. She is an attending physician at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Her column was the inspiration for the television series House M.D., with Yale-New Haven Hospital serving as the model for Princeton-Plainsboro Hospital in the series. Sanders worked as a consultant on the show. In 2019, Netflix aired the program Diagnosis, featuring a selection of cases from her column.

Biography Lisa Sanders was born on July 24, 1956. She grew up in South Carolina. As a child, she loved reading about Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes. After graduation, she was hired by ABC News. She graduated from Yale as the oldest member of her medical school class She also became an attending physician at Yale-New Haven Hospital. She finds her stories from her own patients as well as from those of her colleagues. In 2010, she began crowdsourcing the diagnoses of her cases after hearing the story of an academic who successfully invited members of a medical website to diagnose the cause of his fevers.

Aside from her column, Sanders has also published books. In 2009, she published the book Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis , about the diagnostic value of patient interviews and their neglect relative to tests. Her 2019 book, Diagnosis: Solving the Most Baffling Medical Mysteries, is a compilation of more than 50 stories from her column. She likes to rise early when writing—at 4:00 AM to work on her books and at 5:00 AM for her column, saying it is the time of day when she is "smartest."

She is married to the writer Jack Hitt, and the couple has two children.