Bamforth I. A Doctor's Dictionary: Writings on Culture & Medicine

Manchester: Carcanet, 2015. — 455 p.In this wide-reaching abecedarium, doctor and poet Iain Bamforth dissects the conflict of values embodied in what we call medicine — never entirely a science and no longer quite the art it used to be. Bamforth brings to bear his experience of medicine from around the world, from the hightech American Hospital of Paris to community health centres of Papua, along with his engaging interest in the stranger manifestations of medical matters in relation to art, literature and culture. Drawing on the lives and ideas of some of Europe’s most
celebrated writers, from Auden to Zola with stop-offs at the likes of Darwin, Kafka, Orwell, Proustand Weil along the way, Bamforth offers insightful and witty diagnoses of the culture of medicine in the modern age.Anecdote A Taste of Bitter Almonds
Bodies The Plastinator
Cynicism Knock! Knock!
Depression A Conspiracy of Good Intentions
Ethics Insomnia (in the Bed of Being)
Funerals An American Book of the Dead
Galen Crise de Foie
Happiness The Moral Life of Happiness
Integrity An Empty Plot
Journeys Chekhov Goes to Sakhalin
Kafka Uncle Siegfried
Language Is There Life on Earth?
Mouth Tell Me about Teeth
Nose Hygiene of the Soul
Obit The Importance of Being an Agoraphobe
Posture The Human Position
Qi Emergent Properties
Resilience A Mining Town in Australia
Science (envy) Lamplighters and Lucefactors
Translating Machine Made of Words
Upas The Poison Tree
Vertigo Stendhal’s Syndrome
Weightlessness The War of Eye and Ear
X-rays Under the Magic Mountain
Yellow Fever The Life and Times of Ernst Weiss
(meta-) Zoology ParasitesBy the Same Author