In the current TLS I have a review of two books on cardiac surgery. One is Stephen Westaby’s memoir of his career, the other is Thomas Morris’ historical perspective.
The full text is not freely available online, so here is the bit the TLS have made available to tease you all:
It is tempting to place Stephen Westaby’s Fragile Lives, a memoir of his career as a heart surgeon, in the category the journalist Rosamund Urwin recently called “scalpel lit”; following Atul Gawande’s Complications (2002) and Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm (2014) and Admissions (2017), here is another dispatch from a world arcane even for the majority of doctors. To some degree, Westaby’s book follows the Marsh template. In cardiac surgery as in neurosurgery, life and death are finely poised, and even minor technical mishaps by the surgeon, or brief delays in getting equipment to theatre, can have catastrophic consequences.
Like Marsh, Westaby, a consultant at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, is jaundiced about the bureaucracy of health care and the mandatory “training” imposed on even the most experienced practitioners – “writing my personal development plan at the age of sixty-eight”. Now that death rates are published by the NHS,…
Makes you want to read the whole thing, does it not?
As it happens, Henry Marsh’s Admissions is reviewed in the same issue by George Berridge.
A Medical Education 