I called Marco from the waiting room. Everyone looked waxen under the fluorescent lights of Rheumatology Clinic. His olive skin looked grey. He rose like a grapevine on the trellis – thickset but gnarled through the seasons. Marco helped his wife with her handbag and they walked together. Her gait was […]
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The Reading Room: The Wellcome Book Prize
The shortlist for the Wellcome Book Prize was announced today (http://wellcomebookprize.org/) Awarded annually, and open to works of fiction and nonfiction, the prize focuses on books that have some aspect of medicine, illness or health as their central theme. This year’s shortlist includes the following six titles: The Iceberg by Marion Coutts Do No […]
The Reading Room: A review of Henry Marsh’s ‘Do No Harm’
Reviewed by Eoin Dinneen, Academic Clinical Fellow, University College London Hospital Do No Harm is a remarkably simple book. So much so, The Guardian (the book was short listed for The Guardian ‘First Book Award’) asks, ‘Why has no one ever written a book like this before?’ Each chapter’s starting point is a […]
The Reading Room: A review of ‘Performance, Madness and Psychiatry’
Performance, Madness and Psychiatry Isolated Acts Edited by Anna Harpin & Juliet Foster Reviewed by Femi Oyebode National Centre for Mental Health 25 Vincent Drive Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2FG Femi_oyebode@msn.com In the spring of 1836, John Clare (1793-1864) visited Peterborough and accompanied Mrs. Marsh, the bishop’s wife, to the theatre to see Merchant […]
The Man in Bed Five by Jack Garnham
I go to see the man in bed five. He winks at me. Cracked lips separate to reveal an imperfect set of yellow teeth as a wry smile spreads slowly across his face. It comes with an enormous effort. He looks worse; the burden of disease seems to weigh heavier with each passing hour. […]
The Reading Room: A review of ‘Jo Spence, The Final Project’
Reviewed by Steven Kenny Jo Spence, The Final Project, 1991–92. © The Estate of Jo Spence. Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery, London. Jo Spence was a pioneering figure within the realms of photographic discourse, image based political activism and the application of photography as a therapeutic tool. From the early 1970s Spence worked within […]
Physicians and Magicians: A Magical Education in Life, Death, Power, Potions and Defence Against the Dark Arts by Fiona Dogan and Mark Harper
Abstract The worlds of magic and medicine both involve the sudden initiation of an intimate relationship between two complete strangers – the magician and their subject, or the doctor and their patient. Magic requires the subject to have some degree of trust in the magician, to accept that props and setting may be required to […]
The Reading Room: A review of Katrina Bramstedt’s ‘Trapped in my own labyrinth: poetry spawned by vertigo’
Reviewed by Giskin Day, Senior Teaching Fellow, Imperial College London Many people, including me until I read Katrina Bramstedt’s book, mistakenly use ‘vertigo’ to describe a fear of heights. The correct term for this is ‘acrophobia’. Vertigo is a serious and disabling symptom of a constellation of inner-ear disorders that describes a disorientating, spinning […]
Tiger Country (Hampstead Theatre): A Review by Aneka Popat
For some, the workplace is synonymous with shiny desks, immaculate windows and a calm open sea of computers, complete with the reassuring hubbub of Monday morning gossip. Yet, for those that work in the capital’s hospitals, the workplace is a jungle where the gleam of a scalpel and the unforgiving glare of ward […]
Letting go of ourselves; how opening our minds will let us understand our patients by Benjamin Janaway
Empathy is described by Webster’s dictionary as ‘the feeling that you understand and share another person’s experiences and emotions’ 1, the subjective knowledge that you can be inside the mind of another and feel things as they do. I would argue that although this is a beautiful concept, due to the variation of people’s […]