The danger of learning too much from Covid
When Ray Bradbury was asked if his dystopian vision in Fahrenheit 451 would become a reality, he replied: ‘I don’t…
TB is back with a vengeance
If you were a teenager before 2005, one reminder of tuberculosis in British life is that small circular scar on…
Rationality is like a muscle that needs constant flexing
In the 1964 film My Fair Lady after Colonel Pickering has secured the help of an old friend to pull…
The history of transplants had many false starts
On watching transplant surgery, I can give prosaic but essential advice: have a good breakfast. Each operation can last 12…
Death by negligence: why did no one diagnose my sister’s TB?
In 2016, Arifa Akbar’s elder sister, Fauzia, died suddenly in the Royal Free Hospital, London at the age of 45.…
Masculinity in crisis: Men and Apparitions, by Lynne Tillman, reviewed
Masculinity, we are often told, is in crisis. The narrator of Men and Apparitions, Professor Ezekiel (Zeke) Stark, both studies…
The skeleton is key to solving past mysteries
One hot summer’s morning, as a nine-year-old girl living on the rim of a Scottish loch in the hotel owned…
It took two centuries to eradicate smallpox even after a vaccine was invented
In supposedly unprecedented times such as ours, there are compelling reasons to turn to the history of medicine. For hope,…
We all breathe – 25,000 times a day – so why aren’t we better at it?
Covid-19 has been bad news for writers with books coming out — unless the book is about breathing. We’re all…
Compassion fatigue is as damaging to a doctor’s health as to a patient’s
Medical training is a process of toughening up: take iron that’s vulnerable to rust, add carbon and make steel. That’s…
Popular medical non-fiction will soon have covered every human body part
Nobody warns you when you start medical school that your career decisions have only just begun. Up to a decade…
Can anyone get away with murder anymore?
When the 24-year-old Angela Gallop started working at the Home Office forensic science service, her boss lost no time in…
Discover your inner wolf and lead a better life
For a practical at medical school on the subject of the nervous system, it was thought unwise to wire students…
It’s entirely possible to die of a broken heart
The numbers invite awe: three billion beats in a lifetime; 100,000 miles of vessels. But on the hospital floor, wonder…
The burden of freedom: Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan, reviewed
It’s 1830, and among the sugar cane of Faith Plantation in Barbados, suicide seems like the only way out. Decapitations…
Unlucky in love: Caroline’s Bikini, by Kirsty Gunn, reviewed
‘The most interesting novels are a bit strange,’ Kirsty Gunn once told readers of the London Review of Books. ‘They…
Why I now find listening to Beethoven nauseating
Stephen Bernard has led an institutionalised life. Behind the doors of the church presbytery, at public school, on hospital wards…
How Joseph Lister transformed surgery from butchery to a healing art
Every operation starts the same way. Chlorhexidine scrubbed under nails, lathered over wet hands, palm-to-palm, fingers interlaced, thumbs, wrists, forearms.…
