From Jade Goody to doctors-at-war, there's plenty of good books with a health angle on the shelves, writes PAUL O'DOHERTY
WITH THE windows and doors nearly shut on 2009, and 2010 on the rise, you’re probably wondering what’s on the bookshelves under Health and whether it’s worth your while investing in a couple of book tokens or dropping a few hints as to what Santa might bring you. Well, here are just some of what’s hearty and blood-pumping in a bookstore near you.
First up is Max Pemberton's Where Does it Hurt? – What the Junior Doctor did next(Hodder and Stoughton, £12.99), a humorous take on junior doctoring that follows up on Pemberton's Trust Me, I'm a Junior Doctor.
This time Pemberton is in second year of medical school and his experiences include being mistaken for being homeless, Molly the 80-year-old drugs mule, God in a Tesco car park, and middle-class moms addicted to appearances and painkillers. Essentially, easy reading topped with post-juvenile humour.
Sticking with paperbacks, Stephanie J Snow's Blessed Days of Anaesthesia – How Anaesthetics Changed the World(Oxford University Press, £9.99) is a lot more serious, recalling the emergence of anaesthesia in the 19th century and how it challenged Victorian and Western views of pain, upsetting the Christian conceit that sufferance was God's will.
The chapters rip along taking in the discoveries of the anaesthetic properties of ether, chloroform and nitrous oxide, and debates about risks in childbirth and surgery on the battlefield.
Snow, a research associate at the centre for the history of science, technology and medicine at the University of Manchester, also gets to grips with some of its criminal origins, incorporating Charles Dickens, Florence Nightingale and Louisa May Alcott into an easy-to-read story that charms more like a thriller than an investigation.
Just how fickle our lives are is recorded in Jade Goody's Jade Forever in My Heart – The Story of My Battle Against Cancer(Harper, £6.99), a diary of the last year of a life that got a little bit more than the 15 minutes of fame Warhol's dictum promises.
Starting from the diary room of the Indian edition of Big Brother and the moment she was told she had cancer, the chronicle recalls her last Christmas, the intimacies of family life and her wedding to Jack Tweed, with the final diary entries written by her mother Jackiey Budden. Overall, an emotional rollercoaster that confronts the horrible slide into the valley of death.
A really good book on the misuse of drugs is Philip Robson's Forbidden Drugs, Third Edition, (Oxford University Press, £14.99) a thorough authoritative account of the medical, legal and social aspects of recreational drug use. Robson, a senior research fellow and honorary consultant psychiatrist at Oxford University's department of psychiatry, runs the measure over all the major drugs and their side-effects, while also posing such questions as why do people use drugs and what are the lessons to be learned from making drugs illegal?
Into the hardbacks, Lewis Wolpert's How We Live and Why We Die – The Secret Lives of Cells(Faber and Faber, £14.99), which was published a little earlier in the year, is a fine little pocketbook catch-all that tackles how cells replicate, maintain order, evolve and then die; how stem cells self-replicate; and how humans develop from a single cell.
Well written and to the point, Wolpert, a developmental biologist and emeritus professor of biology at University College London, concludes his thesis with the assessment that no matter how clever we think our cells are, they are even cleverer and have more surprises for science down the line.
Jonathan Edlow's The Deadly Dinner Party and other Medical Detective Stories(Yale University Press, £20), seems more like a title you'd find under Arthur Conan Doyle or Berton Roueché and not surprisingly the author mentions their inspiration in a 15-story collection of mysteries where the murderer or culprit are superbugs, pathogens, bacteria, infections and personal hygiene. Figure that one out Mr Barnaby. If you liked Quincy you'll love this.
Part of a series of medical biographies Andrew Scull's Hysteria – The Biography(Oxford University Press, £12.99) covers the relatively brief history of the 19th-century illness that supposedly only effected hysterical women until the first World War brought with it a male form recoiling from the savagery of shell-shocked modern warfare.
Charcot, Breuer and Freud all get significant mention in a well-written jaunt that will appeal to anyone with an interest in psychoanalysis. Other biographies include Robert Tattersall's Diabetes,Mark Jacob's Asthmaand Christopher Hamlin's Cholera(all from Oxford University Press, £12.99).
Finally, in the doctors-at-war section, so to speak, John Nichol and Tony Rennell's Medic – Saving Lives From Dunkirk to Afghanistan(Viking, £20) tells the story of the various doctors, nurses and stretcher-bearers from across the Irish Sea who literally picked up the pieces when armchair generals like Churchill, Thatcher and Blair went to war to save Poland, the Falklands or Iraq, and other places with smoking guns.
Told through the eyes, ears and letters of the men and women who served in the various divisions of the British army, the tales are particularly brutal and painful when the authors – one an ex-serviceman, the other a former deputy editor of the Sunday Times– recall the duties, adventures and heroics of medics in no-man's land, or forced to surrender or stay with the wounded at Dunkirk or Singapore, or trying to react to the savagery of the Japanese.
Aside from the hagiographical over-written salute that’s Kitchener-esque, there’s a lot to like if you enjoy a mix of war and medical courage.
So, medical and health books of all descriptions, and not one of them with a Government levy, yet.
