All posts filed under: medicine

Atul Gawande on The Checklist Manifesto

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To coincide with his giving this year’s Reith Lectures, I thought I would re-release this interview with Atul Gawande from 2011, in which I spoke to him about The Checklist Manifesto and how something as simple as a checklist could have dramatic, positive benefits in healthcare. “We have people at the frontline who have great expertise – we couldn’t have people in medicine who are better trained, working harder, or given more technology to get their jobs done – and yet the puzzle is that for many of the steps along the way, such as in surgery, we have seven million people a year globally left disabled or dead through complications. At least half the time, we know that it’s from failures to use knowledge that already exists, steps in care that could have avoided it. And so understanding how we close the gaps, not just of ignorance but, for want of a better word, what we have to call ineptitude, is fundamental.”

Jon Ronson on The Psychopath Test

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Early on in his book The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson writes: Having explored the world of extremists in Them, and the wilder shores of the US military’s psychic operations in The Men who Stare at Goats, Jon decided to turn his attention to psychopaths. In this entertaining interview, he explains why. To listen, click here. And to read the first chapter of the book, click here.

The Oxford Textbook of Medicine

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Earlier this year, just before Oxford University Press’s flagship medical title, the Oxford Textbook of Medicine, went online for the first time, I met all three editors of the book and interviewed them about it. The book attempts no less than a full digest of the current state of medical knowledge, and is therefore a huge – and hugely ambitious – undertaking. I was keen to find out more about the values which underpinned the book and also the practical side – how is it possible to stay on top of such a vast and ever-changing field, what does the future hold for the book now that it has gone online, and what are the pleasures of working on such a long-term project? Though the book is intended primarily for professionals, it also finds its way into other contexts; it’s often cited in courts of law, for example. So I hope that this interview will be of interest to medics and non-medics alike. After all, it’s far from unlikely that at some point in your …

3. Books of the Year – Louise Foxcroft

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Our third guest reviewer of this year’s publishing highlights is Cambridge-based historian of medicine, Louise Foxcroft. Louise won the Longman/History Today Prize in 2009 for her book Hot Flushes, Cold Science: A History of the Modern Menopause. You can hear a podcast in which she discusses the book here. And here are Louise’s favourite books of the year: Brian Dillon’s Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (shortlisted for the Wellcome Prize 2009) is a terrific account of a debilitating but abstract condition. It is told through the experiences of articulate sufferers: Proust, who expired, his fears vindicated, in his cork-lined sick room; Warhol who had a dread of doctors and hospitals but couldn’t avoid them; the glamorous Glenn Gould loved his prescription drugs and medical paraphernalia but died of self-neglect; and Boswell, the London Magazine‘s resident “Hypochondriack”, used exercise, regular dining and lots of sex to help him deal with his bodily fears. All these anxieties were made worse by the fallibility of doctors who had few medicines but plenty of platitudes, and whose knowledge was …

Summer Reading Choices: Louise Foxcroft

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Louise Foxcroft is the author of Hot Flushes, Cold Science: A History of the Modern Menopause, which won the Longman History Today prize for Book of the Year 2009.You can listen to my interview with Louise about this book by clicking here. Here are her holiday reading recommendations: In the early summer, ready to get away from the drizzle, I reread Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt and The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay. The English have always been very good at producing caustic aunts who can’t stay put but who can tolerate the young and irritate the rest of the family with their fantasies, politics, and unsuitable lovers. There was a distinct glut of them after the first world war and it was obviously difficult to know what to do with them. On the whole, the aunts seem to have made life up as they went along, so the first idea you have to expunge from your mind is that aunts are in any way dull or cosy. Graham Greene’s aunt appears late …

Le Monde diplomatique podcast – Barbara Ehrenreich

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In this month’s edition of Le Monde diplomatique I have a piece about US journalist and campaigner Barbara Ehrenreich and her latest book, called Smile or Die in the UK and Brightsided in the US. I interviewed Barbara on a snowy evening in Bristol last month before she appeared at the Festival of Ideas to explore her thesis that the relentless promotion of positive thinking is undermining America and its effects are being felt all round the world. If you’re unconvinced that positive thinking is creeping into more and more areas of life, here are some facts with which I began my article: “George W Bush was head football cheerleader in his senior year at prep school. The most popular course offered by Harvard University in 2006 was positive psychology. The total US market for “self-improvement products” in 2005 was estimated at $9.6bn. Last month, during the Haitian earthquake, the top international story on happynews.com – which publishes only good news – was “Prince William attracts crowd in New Zealand”. There are at least four …

31. The Making of Mr Gray’s Anatomy

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“What’s so wonderful about Carter’s illustrations [for Gray’s Anatomy] is that they are not abject people, they are not shown as lumps of meat, they’re not shown as undignified, they’re not shown in pain. In fact, many of the illustrations are quite noble… “It’s the first real anatomy book for students to be published since the development of chloroform, anaesthesia in general, and I think these bodies are chloroformed bodies. They are not being treated as though they are social outcasts; they’re being treated as human beings.” My guest on this week’s programme is medical historian, Ruth Richardson. Ruth has written a fascinating history of how the most famous medical textbook of all time came to be written – Gray’s Anatomy, which is still going strong after more than 150 years and 40 editions. She shows that its success was down to not just Henry Gray, who wrote the text, but also to Henry Carter, who provided the illustrations. In the interview we talk about the very different fates of these two men and also …

26. Who owns your body?

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“This is what I think is really surprising to most people: you don’t actually own your body, in the sense that tissue taken from it and used afterwards is yours to use as you see fit. “The law traditionally took the view that tissue, once it had left the body, was what was called ‘no one’s thing’. “And it took that view because traditionally the tissue wasn’t of any value. It is modern biotechnology that has given it this value.” This podcast is an extended version of an interview I did with Donna Dickenson for Blackwell Online about her book Body Shopping: Converting Body Parts to Profit. We talked about the global commodification of the human body, from the sale of eggs and the “grave-robbing” of bones to gene-patenting. Donna’s approach is not to sensationalize these issues, shocking though they often are, but to look at the big questions we as a society need to face in their ethical, legal and scientific context.

25. Menopause and medicine

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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.