Month: March 2009

25. Menopause and medicine

Louise Foxcroft: Hot Flushes, Cold Science “There was a physician called John Fothergill in the late eighteenth century who said that it was amazing that women had been taught to dread this natural phenomenon.” As Louise Foxcroft’s sometimes shocking history of the menopause shows, Fothergill was very much in the minority. The medical profession in Fothergill’s day was just beginning to cotton on to the idea that the menopause offered a lucrative new subject for treatment.

24. Lost in Birmingham

Catherine O’Flynn: What Was Lost “As he reached for his crisps something caught the corner of his eye and he looked back at the wall of monitors. He saw the figure standing in front of the banks and building societies on level 2. “It was a child, a girl, though her face was hard to see. She stood perfectly still, a notebook in her hand and a toy monkey sticking out of her bag.” When I was in Birmingham earlier this year, I met Catherine O’Flynn, who won the Costa First Novel Award in 2007 for What Was Lost.