A warm welcome today to Dani Hall who is here to talk about Donal Ryan's The Queen of Dirt Island . This is a book that I'd heard quite a lot about and not picked up until Dani suggested that I ought to read it.  I started reading and had to text her after about 5 minutes to say "oh my goodness this is so good, why haven't I picked this up before?" so I really hope you're going to enjoy our conversation today. The book tells the story of four generations  of women in a family in Ireland. We...

Today is a special episode of the podcast where I'm welcoming friends, leaders from all sorts of branches of healthcare to share a book that means something to them about leadership. We would like to dedicate this episode to the memory of Dr Jenny Vaughan who died recently. She was perhaps best known for her campaigning work with Doctors Association UK, https://www.dauk.org/ leading the learn not blame campaign and championing the concept of just culture as well as for campaigning on behalf...

It's a real honour today to welcome Professor Chloe Orkin to Bedside Reading . Chloe  is a researcher, an HIV specialist, a doctor, and an unwell woman and we talk about what that means in the context of Eleanor Cleghorn's brilliant book Unwell Women: a journey through medicine and myth in a man-made world. We talk about feminism, we talk about medical heroes,  we talk about epistemic, testimonial and hermaneutic injustice . I've had a brilliant time talking to Chloe and she has really really...

A warm welcome today to Ben Allen, a GP from Sheffield who is here to talk to me about Amy Edmondson's second book The Right Kind of Wrong which is all about celebrating and learning from failure. Failure is something that health care professionals are not particularly good at.  It's something that we are so often afraid of. So frequently people talk about airline safety and the lessons that can be learned from aviation and those that can be translated into health care and then we wonder why...

As many regular listeners may know I absolutely love talking to authors about their books, especially healthcare professional authors and today is one of those episodes. I am so delighted to welcome Leah Hazard to the podcast to talk about her book Womb: the inside story of where we all began which is a phenomenal book literally for anybody. If only we could get this book into the PHSE curriculum for all young people,  if only we could get all adults to read it. It is phenomenally...

It's a joy today to welcome back Kirsty Shires to Bedside Reading. Kirsty and I first connected last year over Michael Rosen's Many Different Kinds of Love and she emailed me a few weeks ago to tell me about a book that she thought I ought to read which actually I had read before many years ago!  I've absolutely loved coming back to it.  Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down  is the story of a Hmong refugee family and their daughter Lia set in California in the early...

 I'm delighted to welcome Ellen Welch, GP and writer to today's epsiode of Bedside Reading. Ellen's book Why Can't I see my GP: the past present and future of General Practice came out in February this year and feels such a topical read with everything that's been going on at the moment with the GP contract referendum.  If you are a GP you might well enjoy it, recognise a lot of it and then hand it on to family and friends. But if you don't really understand how primary care works if you...

A warm welcome today to Alan Shirley GP and Medical Educator to talk about A Fortunate Man: The story of a country doctor. The seminal John Berger and Jean Mohr book which has to a certain extent stood the test of time and has very much been the classic book mentioned when people talk about medical humanities or about books that relate to GP training. It's not a book just for GPs though and and I really enjoyed my conversation with Alan about the elements of this book that are problematic...

Dr Lucy Pollock's The Book About Getting Older has got to be one of the most compassionate, wise and useful books I have read. It was a delight to be joined by Lauren Wallis, a GPST2 who has moved from being a gynaecologist with a single system focus to a most excellent generalist with a newfound enthusiasm for frailty.

Imagine you could be rid of your sadness, your anxiety, your heartache, your fear. Imagine you could take those feelings from others and turn them into something beautiful. Lynx is a Grief Nurse. Kept by the Asters, a wealthy, influential family, to ensure they’re never troubled by negative emotions, she knows no other life. When news arrives that the Asters’ eldest son is dead, Lynx does what she can to alleviate their Sorrow. As guests flock to the Asters’ private island for the wake,...

Ian Walsh is a Surgeon, psychosexual therapist, academic, musician and an alcoholic. We are talking about Ian's phenomenal book. The Belly of the Whale. It's quite hard to describe this book other than as the rawest most honest warts and all account of his recovery from addiction. There is so much to think about and I'm almost embarrassed to say how much I enjoyed reading it because it takes you to some very very dark places but it's a book I think I will come back to again and again. It is a...

Today's book is a slightly different type of book to actually almost anything that I've ever read before Kinder scout the people's mountain by Ed Douglas and John Beattie looks like a coffee table book. It is big. It is full of absolutely beautiful photography but also some incredibly accessible and interesting prose about the social history and the environmental history of the area around kinder scout in the Peak District. It was a real joy today to talk to Nicola Fisher about this book,...

It's Valentine's Day this week and so what better way to celebrate than with a podcast that's all about sex! I'm delighted to be joined by Dr Naomi Sutton Consultant in Sexual Health and HIV at Rotherham, star of  series 1 and 2 of the E4’s ‘The Sex Clinic’ which “helps young people get their sex lives back on track” and ambassador for The Eve Appeal, a charity that raises awareness of the five gynaecological cancers, and for the FPA.  In her other other media roles, she has talked frankly...

A warm welcome this week to plastic surgeon Sindhoo Rangarajan who suggested to me a fascinating book which I would absolutely not have ever come across without her recommendation. https://www.elle.com/culture/books/a37976150/exclusive-excerpt-zara-stone-killer-looks/ Sindhoo's hero/role model was Dr Elsie Inglis who is someone I think we could all do with knowing more about:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsie_Inglis and we briefly mentioned the fabulous book Endell Street...

What a treat to welcome Maddy Hover (aka the best read zombie fiction fan known to facebook) to Bedside Reading at long last. We are talking about The Good People by Hannah Kent and the challenges of raising children with a difference, the effects of poverty and judgement and why we want society to be so much better, kinder, less harsh than 1830s Ireland and how we fear this is not always the case. Kent took as inspiration for her novel the story of the death of Michael Leahy and the trial...

Dr Jen Gunter OBGYN has got to be one of my favourite social media doctors. Straight talking, easy to understand and full of wisdom and evidence based advice.  Her book The Vagina Bible had been recommended repeatedly and it was great to have the push to read it when Catie Nagel contacted me to suggest we discussed it today. Catie is a GP with a medical education research interest in Persistent Physical Symptoms. We had a great conversation about why we should not be using the phrase...

My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises by Fredrick Backman was, on first reading, my least favourite Backman novel.  Is that because the others I've read are so very brilliant indeed? Or because I was missing something? I'm delighted to welcome Sara from https://intensivegassingaboutbooksblog.wordpress.com/ to bedside reading to the podcast this week.   Sara is possibly the definition of a bookworm, reading 4-5 novels a week and blogging about the majority of them. She's also a...

Happy New Year and welcome to season 6 of Bedside Reading!! I so enjoyed meeting John Quin in 2022 at the DotMD festival. Our paths have crossed repeatedly on Twitter and then in person at Medicine Unboxed so it was a real treat to sit down together to record this episode about his memoir Medicine Man.  John is a retired endocrinologist with a second career as an arts writer. Find him on Twitter https://twitter.com/JDMQuin I loved talking about careers, changes, storytelling, opportunities...

A reflective look back over 2023 and some thoughts for 2024 as I'm joined by friends of the podcast to think about their tops reads of the year and their most anticipated reads for 2023. Huge thank you to Claire McKie, Dani Hall, Anna Baverstock, Nik Kendrew, Nicola Davis, Selina Flinders, Alan Coss, Fran Boffey, Charley Baker and Derek Ochiai and Ellie Hothersall

What a treat to welcome Catherine Bell and Stephanie Farrell Moore to Bedside Reading to talk about their wonderful small anthology of poetry by neurodivergent women Kaleidoscopic Minds. Follow them on instagram here https://www.instagram.com/kaleidoscopic_minds_poetry/ Buy your copy here https://kaleidoscopicmindsuk.etsy.com/listing/1606941954 All proceeds go to Autistic Girls Network https://autisticgirlsnetwork.org/ Huge thank you to https://twitter.com/Cathersbell for producing this...

I'm delighted to welcome the wonderful Andy Tagg, ED consultant (and part of the DFTB team who ate lego heads and calculated their FART score as the sieved their poo to work out how long it takes to pass a swallowed plastic toy https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/nov/27/shit-a-brick-doctors-swallow-lego-to-allay-parents-fears) to Bedside Reading this week. Follow Andy on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/andrewjtagg Andy is a gamer, I am not. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was...

It's such a treat to welcome back Ana Sampson for a dive into ideas for your Jolabokaflod.  As happens every time I speak to Ana we set out to think about a few books - the brief today was 5 - and end up side tracked and delighted to talk about more. Ana's own poetry collection Gods and Monsters is definitely up there for me as a book to buy (or request...) You can buy your Christmas Books wherever you most enjoy shopping but here's a link to my favourite independent bookshop's storefront...

Oliver Sacks classic book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat is one of the absolute classic texts in the genre of stories from the humanity of medicine. It's fascinating to go back to it with the mind of someone working in 2023. It was lovely to connect with Neurologist Louisa Kent to think about our responses to it and our perceptions of the way the book is written and the huge changes that have occurred in the last 20 years.

A confession, I don't like Greek mythology. AT ALL. I did however love this book both when I first read it 10 years ago and on re-reading for this podcast. Achilles, "the best of all the Greeks," son of the cruel sea goddess Thetis and the legendary king Peleus, is strong, swift, and beautiful, irresistible to all who meet him. Patroclus is an awkward young prince, exiled from his homeland after an act of shocking violence. Brought together by chance, they forge an inseparable bond, despite...