A TIMES BEST BOOK OF 2022 SO FAR Shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2022 ‘Sparkling history…with a fairytale atmosphere of sleigh rides, royal palaces and heroic risk-taking’ The Times A killer virus…an all-powerful Empress…an encounter cloaked in secrecy…the astonishing true story. Within living memory, smallpox was a dreaded disease. Over human history it has killed untold millions. Back in the eighteenth century, as epidemics swept Europe, the first rumours emerged of an effective treatment: a mysterious method called inoculation. But a key problem remained: convincing people to accept the preventative remedy, the forerunner of vaccination. Arguments raged over risks and benefits, and public resistance ran high. As smallpox ravaged her empire and threatened her court, Catherine the Great took the momentous decision to summon the Quaker physician Thomas Dimsdale to St Petersburg to carry out a secret mission that would transform both their lives. Lucy Ward expertly unveils the extraordinary story of Enlightenment ideals, female leadership and the fight to promote science over superstition. ‘A rich and wonderfully urgent work of history’ Tristram Hunt
The book describes what goes on behind the scenes in undergraduate and postgraduate medical education, scientific research and general medical practice in the United Kingdom. It covers the years 1945 to 2012 and is an account of a unique medical journey. The author was brought up by parents who were general practitioners in Yorkshire. His upbringing was thoroughly middle class and his observations of his parents work and lifestyle resulted in his wanting to be a doctor. Medical student life at University College London was hard work. Several of his teachers were eminent and world famous. Two of them were Professors J Z Young (anatomy) and Andrew Huxley (Physiology and Nobel Prize winner). Life-long friendships were made with fellow students who worked together dissecting a human body. Experiments were performed on one another. The social life in the 1960s of a group of medical student friends is described. Studying octopuses and squid in Naples, Italy. Was part of an extra degree course which was undertaken before starting hospital clinical studies? These were at The London Hospital, Whitechapel, in the east end of London. There was so much to learn before being allowed to practice as a doctor. Clinical studies were undertaken at The London Hospital, Whitechapel. This is one of the oldest hospitals in the UK. There is a huge learning curve which resulted in a doctor just about able to deal with patients. A year of pre-registration work started on the medical wards at Mile End Hospital followed by a period in the Receiving Room (Accident and Emergency Department) at The London Hospital. The pre-registration house jobs sometimes involved working 100 hours a week. Nights in the accident emergency department were manned by one pre-registration house officer and a nurse. There is a description of what is involved undertaking research to PhD level in physiology. A new clinical thermometer was designed, tested and eventually manufactured and sold by the instrument developer Muirhead Ltd. So soon after being a student, the wheels had turned and the author was teaching students himself. There is an account of starting work as a General Practitioner in Cheltenham having not seen a single patient for the previous three years. After that he worked for a short time in a London practice and then in Castleford, West Yorkshire from 1978 to 2005. He and his wife build the practice up from a zero base to a thriving training practice housed in a large modern clinic. Doing this was financially risky as well as stressful. The development of postgraduate general practice education in Yorkshire in the last two decades of the twentieth century is described. There are descriptions of becoming a trainer of prospective GPs and then organising and managing trainers. The role of a GP tutor in the education of GPs was undertaken as a specific job. Work on the assessment of the competence of trainee GPs was overseen in the Yorkshire Deanery, based in Leeds, West Yorkshire. Work on the monitoring of the GP contract with the NHS and the GP appraisal scheme was undertaken by NHS Wakefield district, a Primary Care Trust. The author worked for both these bodies and what was involved in GP appraisal and inspection of practices target achievements is examined in detail. Work with ill and underperforming general practitioners is described as well as mentoring GPs with problems and worries. Very few patient problems and cases are included in this book which rather tells of the work that went on in the background. It is that work that produces high quality doctors and also year on year improvement in patient care. The last chapter involved informal interviews in 2012 with people studying and working in the same fields experienced over the years by the author and outlined above. Readers are asked to judge whether the present day situation is an improvement on
Alex is the unbelievably rich heir of a prestigious family, and not only does he live in a huge mansion, he's also good-looking, a brilliant doctor...and a confirmed bachelor. Jenny's younger sister, Chloe, claimed that this man was the father of her child, Daisy, before she passed away. Jenny wants more than anything for Alex to fulfill his responsibility as a father, so she brings Daisy to visit Alex at his house. The man she meets there is as much of a coldhearted playboy as the rumors claim. He gives the two of them an appraising look, and finally says, scornfully, "Is it money you're after? That's too bad. That baby isn't mine."?
Here's the latest edition of the very practical book for overseas doctors. This book helps to familiarize doctors with the colloquial English language spoken in their clinical work. This unique text is fully updated, including new case histories, new phrasal verbs, sample letters that include new relevant issues such as audit and trust-hospital organization, and new social changes and the language implications for doctors.
An orphan leaves Dark Ages London to study medicine in Persia in this “rich” and “vivid” historical novel from a New York Times–bestselling author (The New York Times). A child holds the hand of his dying mother and is terrified, aware something is taking her. Orphaned and given to an itinerant barber-surgeon, Rob Cole becomes a fast-talking swindler, peddling a worthless medicine. But as he matures, his strange gift—an acute sensitivity to impending death—never leaves him, and he yearns to become a healer. Arab madrassas are the only authentic medical schools, and he makes his perilous way to Persia. Christians are barred from Muslim schools, but claiming he is a Jew, he studies under the world’s most renowned physician, Avicenna. How the woman who is his great love struggles against her only rival—medicine—makes a riveting modern classic. The Physician is the first book in New York Times–bestselling author Noah Gordon’s Dr. Robert Cole trilogy, which continues with Shaman and concludes with Matters of Choice.
In this quietly revolutionary work of social observation and medical philosophy, Booker Prize-winning writer John Berger and the photographer Jean Mohr train their gaze on an English country doctor and find a universal man--one who has taken it upon himself to recognize his patient's humanity when illness and the fear of death have made them unrecognizable to themselves. In the impoverished rural community in which he works, John Sassall tend the maimed, the dying, and the lonely. He is not only the dispenser of cures but the repository of memories. And as Berger and Mohr follow Sassall about his rounds, they produce a book whose careful detail broadens into a meditation on the value we assign a human life. First published thirty years ago, A Fortunate Man remains moving and deeply relevant--no other book has offered such a close and passionate investigation of the roles doctors play in their society. "In contemporary letters John Berger seems to me peerless; not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience." --Susan Sontag
Alex Westerling is a brilliant doctor. He's committed,dedicated and has a magical touch with his patients.He's also never out of the newspapers and celebritymagazines, as he's an aristocrat with a string of womenlining up behind him.…That's until beautiful nurse Jenny Phillips turns up on hisdoorstep—claiming that her late sister's baby, cradledin her arms, is his child! Alex is certain he has never,ever set eyes on Jenny or her sister before! ButJenny is sure Alex is the father—until he canprove otherwise.
The Doctor, Romana and K9 are in 1930s London, planning to rest after their recent adventures. But what connects the Sussex resort of Nutchurch with the secret society run by Percy Closed? Why has Hepworth Stackhouse hired an assassin? And what is the infe
A masterpiece of enduring power, Doctor Glas confronts a chilling moral quandary with gripping intensity. With an introduction by Margaret Atwood. Stark, brooding, and enormously controversial when first published in 1905, this astonishing novel juxtaposes impressions of fin-de-siècle Stockholm against the psychological landscape of a man besieged by obsession. Lonely and introspective, Doctor Glas has long felt an instinctive hostility toward the odious local minister. So when the minister’s beautiful wife complains of her husband’s oppressive sexual attentions, Doctor Glas finds himself contemplating murder. "Imagine the classic nineteenth-century drama featuring a tyrannical older man, his hapless daughter or young wife, and her caddish suitor, as in Balzac's Eugénie Grandet and Henry James's Washington Square, this time conjured up by a sensibility akin to Strindberg's and Ingmar Bergman's—and you begin to have an idea of the force and candor of this searing masterwork of Nothern European literature. The retrieval of Doctor Glas in English is a bracing gift to hungry readers." —Susan Sontag
The 2017 National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Finalist, International Bestseller, and a Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2017! “Marsh has retired, which means he’s taking a thorough inventory of his life. His reflections and recollections make Admissions an even more introspective memoir than his first, if such a thing is possible.” —The New York Times "Consistently entertaining...Honesty is abundantly apparent here--a quality as rare and commendable in elite surgeons as one suspects it is in memoirists." —The Guardian "Disarmingly frank storytelling...his reflections on death and dying equal those in Atul Gawande's excellent Being Mortal." —The Economist Henry Marsh has spent a lifetime operating on the surgical frontline. There have been exhilarating highs and devastating lows, but his love for the practice of neurosurgery has never wavered. Following the publication of his celebrated New York Times bestseller Do No Harm, Marsh retired from his full-time job in England to work pro bono in Ukraine and Nepal. In Admissions he describes the difficulties of working in these troubled, impoverished countries and the further insights it has given him into the practice of medicine. Marsh also faces up to the burden of responsibility that can come with trying to reduce human suffering. Unearthing memories of his early days as a medical student, and the experiences that shaped him as a young surgeon, he explores the difficulties of a profession that deals in probabilities rather than certainties, and where the overwhelming urge to prolong life can come at a tragic cost for patients and those who love them. Reflecting on what forty years of handling the human brain has taught him, Marsh finds a different purpose in life as he approaches the end of his professional career and a fresh understanding of what matters to us all in the end.
