What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear by Danielle Ofri, Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2017, 288 pages, £21.99. Reviewed by Ben Bravery It is the oldest tool in any doctor’s bag, and it is as important today as it was 200 years ago. It is not a device, gadget or pill. The side-effects are […]
Category: Book Reviews
Book Review: Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice
Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice: New Conversations Across the Disciplines by M Buchbinder, M Rivkin-Fish and RL Walker (eds). Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016, 320 pages, £37.50. Reviewed by Professor John Harrington, Cardiff University Inequality has returned to the political agenda in Europe and North America in the aftermath of the […]
Book Review: No Apparent Distress
No Apparent Distress: A Doctor’s Coming-of-Age on the Front Lines of American Medicine by Rachel Pearson, New York: W.W. Norton, 2017, 272 pages, £21.99. Reviewed by John Coulehan, Stony Brook University, NY Was there a time before memoirs of medical training became a popular genre of nonfiction? It’s difficult now to imagine a time before aspiring young […]
Book Review: Balint Matters
Balint Matters: Psychosomatics and the Art of Assessment by Jonathan Sklar, London: Karnac, 2017, 254 pages, £27.99. Reviewed by Dr Neil Vickers. Michael Balint is mentioned in medical humanities circles as a revered ancestor, much as one might talk about William Empson as a significant figure in the history of English literary criticism. Everyone knows […]
Book Review: Eros and Illness
Eros and Illness by David B. Morris, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017, 368 pages, £31.95. Review by George Derk, PhD (gtd2gu@virginia.edu) With the provocative pairing in the title of his new book, David Morris sets himself the task of dramatically altering the perceived relation between these two terms. As he contends, there exists less of […]
Book Review: Notes From the Sick Room
Notes from the Sick Room by Steve Finbow, London: Repeater Books, 2017, 343 pages, £8.99. Reviewed by Alan Radley, Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology, Loughborough University This is a book about sickness, more specifically about the illnesses of a number of well-known artists and philosophers. It is also about the illness history of the book’s […]
Book Review: Deleuze and Baudrillard: From Cyberpunk to Biopunk
Deleuze and Baudrillard: From Cyberpunk to Biopunk by Sean McQueen, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016, 288 pages, £70. Reviewed by Dr Anna McFarlane (University of Glasgow) Sean McQueen’s first monograph ambitiously aims to create “a cognitive mapping of the transition from late capitalism to biocapitalism” (1) and to do this through tracing trends in science […]
Book Review – Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England
Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England by Olivia Weisser, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015, 296 pages, £60. Reviewed by Sarah O’Dell, Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, CA 91702, sodell10@apu.edu In this well-researched and compelling work, Olivia Weisser addresses the relative paucity of scholarship on early modern gender and illness to argue […]
Book Review: The Mystery of Being Human
Raymond Tallis, The Mystery of Being Human: God, Freedom and the NHS. Notting Hill Editions, 2016. Reviewed by Dr Sara Booth This collection of essays – lucid, varied, compelling – is by retired academic geriatrician and neuroscientist Professor Raymond Tallis. A man who may truly be called a polymath, he is not […]
Book Review – A Body of Work: An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine
Corinna Wagner and Andy Brown (Eds.) A Body of Work. An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine. London, Bloomsbury, 2016, 532 pages Jack Coulehan, MD, Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794 USA At first glance medicine and poetry seem like strange bedfellows. Yet, consider the fact that […]