Erika Wright. Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2016) Reviewed by Dr Jane Darcy, Department of English, University College London Erika Wright begins Reading for Health with a timely reminder for Victorianists, quoting Ruskin’s argument about the dangerous temptation of the ‘phenomenon of the sick-room’ for […]
Category: Book Reviews
The Reading Room: Salka Valka
Salka Valka by Halldór Laxness: she needs to be alone Reviewed by David S. Baldwin, Professor of Psychiatry Clinical and Experimental Sciences Academic Unit Faculty of Medicine, University of Southampton, United Kingdom Email: dsb1@soton.ac.uk Born in Reykjavík in April 1902, Halldór Guðjónsson (he changed his name to Halldór Kiljan Laxness in 1923) […]
The Reading Room: The Other Side of Silence
The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir of Depression by Linda Gask. Vie Books, 2015 Reviewed by Dr Lilian Hickey There is a shocking, but humane and tender poetry in George Eliot’s lines in Middlemarch which refer to the deafening ‘roar’ of life that might lie ‘on the other side of silence’ in our […]
The Reading Room: When Breath Becomes Air
Hope, Oncology and Death Seamus O’Mahony When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. London: The Bodely Head, 2016. Paul Kalanithi was nearing the end of his neurosurgical training at Stanford when aged thirty-six, he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. He had never smoked. He was referred to an oncologist specializing in […]
The Reading Room: ‘Making Medical Knowledge’
Making Medical Knowledge By Miriam Solomon Oxford University Press, 2015 Reviewed by Dr Jonathan Fuller, University of Toronto We should forgive anyone unfamiliar with recent trends in ‘scientific medicine’ for thinking that within scientific medicine there are now multiple medicines to choose from: evidence-based medicine (EBM), translational medicine, narrative medicine, personalized medicine, […]
The Reading Room: This Living and Immortal Thing
And so it goes…this thing called life Fergus Shanahan This Living and Immortal Thing By Austin Duffy Granta Books, 2016 If authors write what they know, then Austin Duffy knows a lot, but This Living and Immortal Thing, his first novel, blends experience with fiction and offers more than informed opinion […]
The Reading Room: ‘Deaf Gain’
Deaf Gain: Raising the Stakes for Human Diversity H-Dirksen L. Bauman and Joseph J. Murray, Editors University of Minnesota Press, 2014 Reviewed by Dr Paul Dakin, GP Trainer in North London with research interest in the representation of d/Deaf people This book challenges the commonly held notion that deafness is an existence […]
The Reading Room: Jenny Downham’s ‘Unbecoming’
Unbecoming by Jenny Downham. Published by David Fickling Books, 2015. Reviewed by Katie Hodgkinson, Medical Student They say don’t judge a book by its cover, but the cover of Unbecoming is beautiful, and the story inside even more so. I’m generally a bit wary of Jenny Downham as an author because I did […]
Take Me With You: the Museum of Friendship, Remembrance and Loss
Take Me With You: the Museum of Friendship, Remembrance and Loss 6.00-8.30 pm, Thursday 18 February 2016 at the Chowen Lecture Theatre, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, Falmer Campus BN1 9PX Museum open from 6.00 pm Clare Best and Tim Andrews in conversation (+q&a) 6.30-7.30 pm Drinks reception from 7.30 pm Museum open until 8.30 […]
The Reading Room: Clive James’s ‘Sentenced to Life’
Sentenced to Life by Clive James. Published by Picador, 2015. Reviewed by Dr Sam Guglani. On a ward round, I notice a colleague speaking with one of the palliative care nurses – about a patient, or perhaps about processes, maybe even about a personal matter. His posture, and what I can hear of his […]