Helen Garner’s The Spare Room (published by Canongate) is an exploration of the emotional and practical turmoil engendered by caring for someone who is grasping at straws to evade the terminal truth of their illness. The narrative probes a friendship between two feisty women when it is taken to new levels of intensity by […]
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Manners maketh the doctor
The other day I made a call to our local hospital to ask a colleague to see a patient of mine as a matter of urgency. I asked the switchboard operator to page the relevant on-call registrar who duly appeared on the other end of the line. Using “hello?” as his tense, inpatient, opening gambit […]
When is dementia not dementia: a lesson in listening
In the last few weeks, working as a GP, it seems like I’ve seen more pneumonia and bronchitis than at any time in the last 20 years. As a practice, we’ve also had a number of our elderly patients admitted as emergencies, sometimes after seeing one of us and sometimes when they’ve sought hospital care […]
Sex, suicide and surgical blues: getting under the skin of Grey’s Anatomy
I’d always hoped that one day I’d finally get to grips with the contents of Gray’s Anatomy. Perhaps then I’d be able to write the sort of blog my friend Babette- a sport’s physician- would like me to write. To quote Babette, she’d like me to write something “simple, like sports, or the athlete’s heart, […]
Human Identity in the Age of Bio-science: two gems from Radio 4
As civilians in both Gaza and Israel spend another day living and dying in fear and surrounded by hate, Ali Abbas, a young man who as a child lost 16 members of his family and both his arms in the Iraq conflict, tells reporter Hugh Sykes his story. Ali’s story reminds us of the human […]
Henderson’s Equation: embracing science, facilitating human flourishing
I’m fond of referring, in talks and in discussions about medical professionalism, to the midnight meal. It’s a metaphor that I borrow from Dr Jerome Lowenstein, a friend and colleague who wrote an essay of the same name. In that essay he recalls a time when the medical team would meet in the hospital restaurant, […]
House MD: just what the doctor ordered
http://www.fox.com/house/gallery/ Back in the mid-80s when, as a junior doctor, I went to work in the US, I caused a mini-panic amongst the nurses by refusing, at least for a short while, to sign “MD” after my orders. An order in this context being a written order to the nurses to do the myriad of […]
Can a comic a day keep the doctor away? GP Ian Williams thinks so
In these uncertain economic times there seems to be a growing nostalgia for the more simple things in life. Home baking and dressmaking is on the rise and many families are anticipating a less commercialised festive get together. Although some of this return to basics is undoubtedly driven by economic imperatives, anecdotal evidence seems to […]
Rubens and the art of observation: a dying clinical skill?
Peter Paul Rubens. Helene Fourment in a fur wrap (Het Pelsken). c.1635. Oil on panel, 176×83 cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Do you ever really look at your patients? I mean really, really, look, so carefully that you’re in danger of making both of you feel uncomfortable? And if you do, do you look with the eye of […]
Understanding childhood obesity:the Wellcome Trust film and video archive goes digital
I’m grateful to Christy Henshaw for letting me know about an exciting new project from the Wellcome Trust. So far about 100 films from the Trust’s vast archive of film and video have been digitalised and can be viewed by anyone, free-of-charge, on-line. A brief glance at the titles led me to a fascinating insight […]