Book review by Professor Robert Abrams, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York. Walk with the Weary: Lessons in Humanity in Health Care, Dr M.R. Rajagopal, Notion Press, Chennai, India, 2022. Walk with the Weary by Dr M.R. Rajagopal is an account of how one physician moved from a career in anesthesiology to a lifetime mission […]
Category: Book Reviews
The Song of Our Scars: Exploring the Social and Scientific Fundamentals of Chronic Pain
Book Review by Vishal Khetpal The Song of Our Scars: The Untold Story of Pain. Haider Warraich. Basic Books. ISBN 9781541675308. Skim through any bestseller list in adult non-fiction these days and you will find books that grapple with pain and chronic illness. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps Score maps the landscape of […]
Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies
Book Review by Laura Grace Simpkins Maddie Mortimer. Picador. 2022. ISBN 9781529069365 Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is the debut novel from writer Maddie Mortimer. It follows the last few months of Lia’s life–an illustrator in her forties married to university professor, Harry, and mother to precocious tweenage daughter, Iris. Lia is dying of cancer. […]
The Invisible Kingdom: Beyond “Heartsink”
Book Review by Samuel Freeman In 1988 general practitioner T.C. O’Dowd published a study in the British Medical Journal, “Five years of heartsink patients in general practice.”[1] The study describes a group of patients who “exasperate, defeat, and overwhelm their doctors by their behaviour” and concludes that they are “a disparate group of individuals whose […]
Renaissance Medicine: A Short History of European Medicine in the Sixteenth Century
Book review by Katherine D. Van Schaik Vivian Nutton. Renaissance Medicine: A Short History of European Medicine in the Sixteenth Century. Routledge, 2022. Vivian Nutton’s comprehensive Renaissance Medicine: A Short History of European Medicine in the Sixteenth Century, written largely during the pandemic, provides an overview of a century of medical transformations in Europe. Nutton […]
Scattered Limbs: A Medical Dreambook
Book Review by Neil Vickers Iain Bamforth is a physician-writer who tries to understand his life in terms of philosophy, literature, history and art. He is stupendously well-read in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish sources, which he deploys to beguiling effect in this strange and magnificent book. In a ‘Preface’ to Scattered Limbs, Bamforth […]
Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada
Book Review by Philip B. Berger Shaheen-Hussain, Samir. Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada. Foreword by Cindy Blackstock, afterword by Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel. McGill-Queen’s Indigenous and Northern Studies Series, 2020. Samir Shaheen-Hussain, a pediatric emergency physician, does not hold back in his historical scholarship detailing the pain […]
Grief Connects Us: A Neurosurgeon’s Lessons on Love, Loss, and Compassion
Book Review by Jeffrey M. Brown Stern, Joseph D. Grief Connects Us: A Neurosurgeon’s Lessons on Love, Loss, and Compassion. Central Recovery Press, 2021. Joseph Stern’s recent book, Grief Connects Us, opens with a study in contrasts. “My younger sister was an actress,” Stern writes. She was creative, trusting, warm, an engaged wife and […]
Movement of Knowledge: Medical Humanities Perspectives on Medicine, Science, and Experience
Book Review by Isobel Newby Hansson, Kristofer and Rachel Irwin, editors. Movement of Knowledge: Medical Humanities Perspectives on Medicine, Science, and Experience. Nordic Academic Press, 2020. Movement of Knowledge, edited by Kristofer Hansson and Rachel Irwin, is the result of a collaborative effort by the Cultural Studies Group of Neuroscience at Lund University. Indeed, multidisciplinary […]
How I Lost My Mother: A Story of Life, Care and Dying by Leslie Swartz
Book Review by Ken Junior Lipenga Leslie Swartz. How I Lost My Mother: A Story of Life, Care and Dying. Wits University Press, 2021. 222 pages. There are multiple angles from which one could approach Leslie Swartz’s latest life writing publication, How I Lost My Mother: A Story of Life, Care and Dying. The […]