Piece on cardiac surgery in Times Literary Supplement

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.

Stephen Westaby, “community focus”, and medical education

Not so long ago, surgery and (internal) medicine were the pinnacles of medical school, the final subjects before graduation. Surgery in particular possessed a dark, elitist glamour, its notoriously long hours and intensity attracting rather than repelling many. Of course, being attracted by a perceived mystique is different from having a sustainable career (and life)

In recent years, medical curricula have been reshaped by many factors, including the realisation that most doctors will practice not as surgeons but as general practitioners, and that the bulk of healthcare need is perhaps more mundane than what goes on in the operating theatre. While there is justice to this “community orientation” of medical education, there is also a certain sense of taking the surgeons and physicians down a peg or twenty. Perhaps there is also a certain anti-intellectualism at work – focusing on the behavioural acts that a doctor performs, rather than the academic disciplines (which include clinical disciplines)

Recently I have been reading Simon Westaby’s memoir of his surgical career, Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table. Indeed, the above paragraphs are taken from a first draft of my review (both paragraphs cut for reasons of space and general narrative flow of the review). Westaby’s book is a good read (there, that’s the review bit out of the way) and full of exciting surgical action, described deftly but dramatically. It is also something of an elegy for a certain time of medical and surgical training – an era of overwork and monomaniacal dedication, but also one of intellectual and moral curiosity and rigour, often absent from a modern practice subservient to bureaucratic imperatives. I have already blogged about Westaby’s thoughts (and research) on the impact of league tables on surgical practice. I do wonder whether, for all its manifold faults, “traditional” medical education created a breed of doctor with an espirit de corps to whom a resistance to bureaucratic imperatives came easier?