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It's a first on bedside reading today in that I've got three guests rather than my customary one and occasional two. I am delighted to welcome to the podcast Beth Osmond, Eleanor Holmes and Sarah Raybould, three doctors who are also published poets. We are going to be talking today about Kathryn Bevis's beautiful collection, The Butterfly House, which on the cover is described as "the story of a life before and after a late stage cancer diagnosis". In the podcast today, we've chosen to focus on three of the cancer poems from this beautiful little book.
I would like to point out though that there are lots of other poems in the collection which are perhaps less dark and more reflective of Kathryn Bevis's wonder with life, the importance of living and really that theme of living with a long-term condition, recognising cancer as a life-changing and potentially life-limiting condition. but something that people are more and more living with rather than necessarily being cured of or dying from. It's a wonderful collection and it is moving, it is thought-provoking, it is funny. I really enjoyed it and I've really loved my conversation today with Beth, Eleanor and Sarah.
If you'd like to follow any of these wonderful poets
Find Sarah here:
https://www.instagram.com/raybould_sarah/
https://underneaththisskin.comFind Beth here:
https://twitter.com/bethosmond
https://www.instagram.com/osmond_beth/
Find Eleanor here:
https://twitter.com/eliot_north
https://www.dreleanorholmes.com/
and if you'd like to buy a copy of this gorgeous collection please order direct from Seren Books here https://www.serenbooks.com/book/the-butterfly-house/ -
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I am so delighted to be talking to Emily Katy, the author of Girl Unmasked: How Uncovering My Autism Saved My Life. I love talking to authors. I'm always fascinated to be talking to authors who are also health professionals. Emily is both: a psychiatric nurse and a writer. I've been following Emily on social media for quite a while, I was really excited when her book came out to see what it was going to be like because I'd read her blog and I'd seen a lot of other articles that she'd written. It was a real joy today to meet her properly and to be talking about her book, why she wrote her book, about her life experiences and thinking a lot about autistic women and autistic girls, why they get missed, why it is important that we think about autism and why the stereotypes that many of us have been brought up on are quite simply wrong and mean that people go without a diagnosis and unnoticed.
Follow Emily on Twitter https://twitter.com/ItsEmilyKaty
and on instagram https://www.instagram.com/itsemilykaty
Her brilliant blog is here: https://www.authenticallyemily.uk/
Emily is a trustee of the brilliant charity Autistic Girls Network find them here: https://autisticgirlsnetwork.org/ -
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I've got two brilliant guests with me to today, Roo Shah and Jens Foell, who have written a phenomenal book called Fighting for the Soul of General Practice: the Algorithm will see you now. This is a wonderful book, two GPs, one based in London, one based in rural North Wales writing about patient stories and the values of relational medicine, thinking about what we are at risk of losing as we try wholly appropriately to manage demand, to keep services running when there isn't enough money and there aren't enough staff.
But what we're losing by doing it, and whether in fact it's okay to stand up and say, "I don't want to be replaced by a computer". I've long said that the things that are of the most value are those which are not directly measurable and so I absolutely loved Jens and Roo's book. It's very, very readable and it'll make you think, but it won't hurt your head. It's not difficult. It's not dense text. They are both phenomenal storytellers, and this is really about stories and the value of what lies beneath the iceberg, the tip of the iceberg perhaps being a diagnosis but recognising there is so so much more going on and really what we risk losing if we don't remember that.
I love the book and I have really really enjoyed talking to Jens and Roo and I would really strongly encourage you to go and buy yourself a copy of this book as soon as you possibly can.
Roo mentions the brilliant short story The Machine Stops by E M Forster you can read it online here: http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/59/59.pdf -
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A warm welcome back today to James Thambirajah, who is here to talk to me about a book called Heart, a History by Sandip Jauhar. This is, I will confess, a book that I probably might not have picked up voluntarily but James is very persuasive, and I'm really glad I did pick it up, because once I had I was absolutely compelled to keep reading. Sandip Jawa is a wonderful writer. He's a cardiologist based in the USA. And this interweaves stories, stories of people, stories of Sandeep's own life, story of patients, stories of his family, with the history of cardiology. The history of cardiology. I didn't really know a huge amount about the history of cardiology it is just fascinating to realise how far we've come over the last 50 or 100 years. I'm really thinking about the bravery of the people who chose to give up everything to explore what they thought might be going on. We've got stories of young doctors passing wires into their own arms and legs in the earliest angiograms. We've got prototype bypass machines being built. We've got people making cardiac pacemakers in their kitchens. It's absolutely incredible, really, really exciting. And I would say I'm not even particularly interested in cardiology, but this is holistic cardiology. This is the history of medicine with some cardiology and some humanity and thinking about hearts in the sense of the heart and soul of a person. It's a cracking read and I've loved talking to James about it. -
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It's a warm welcome back to a guest today. I'm delighted to be talking to Susan Matthew about Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent. Susan came on the podcast a couple of years ago and I got an email from her out of the blue recently saying, "I've just read this book, it's absolutely brilliant, I think you'd really like it and I really need to talk about it on the podcast" and I was really quite intrigued. I picked it up and it said on the cover that it was a crime novel and my heart slightly sank because I'm not a huge crime fan. But actually, I'm not convinced that this book is a crime novel. It's just a brilliant, brilliant novel with some twists and turns along the way. Maybe that's how you define what crime is....
There are loads of themes in here. It's a great book. Lots and lots of things to think about: adverse childhood experiences, the power of community, the importance of transitional objects, how we learn, whether labels matter. There is so much to talk about and so much to think about, and I really enjoyed talking to Susan. -
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Regular listeners will know that I love talking to writers and I love poetry. So what a joy it is today to welcome Anna Davidson to Bedside Reading to talk about her debut poetry collection: Poetry for Life and Other Chronic Conditions. Anna's poems are absolutely beautiful. It's a very beautiful little book, it's got a gorgeous cover and the contents, both the poems and the writing around the poems and the sense of why Anna wrote these poems, what they mean for her and what she hopes they might achieve for the world is just fabulous. and If you're thinking of a collection to recommend, I can't really think of anything else that is quite like it. In terms of thinking about invisible illness, thinking about disability, thinking about recovery, thinking about missing out, some of the psychological effects of living with a physical long-term condition, um It's absolutely unbeatable, certainly something I'm going to be using in my teaching and it's a collection I think I will come back to again and again.
Anna recommended https://www.theyogaforlifeproject.co.uk/
Link to buy the book from all retailers:https://books2read.com/poetryforlife
Poetry on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/mondayispoetry/
Author website:
https://therightword.co.uk/
Amazon link to buy the book:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Poetry-Life-Other-Chronic-Conditions-ebook/dp/B0D5VWQDRK/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9._vNdz86YT_1x-XcrFRc6ZyigquxkN6XBRpe5__1MlJpj4bmAGtIn0TyJ1PW2nmtuEkubRrff3Z_LLlYIQZV9mtzVNl7OIGC2DLXCPq6LDT2M1AMixviEn5P7a7lTT-7H.8lMSqBB0IJZ5Zl5htpdSWpWVCi0egqDE-_VmL9s5BtU&qid=1722246103&sr=8-1
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A warm welcome back to GP, educator and YouTube sensation, Dave Hindmarsh. Today we are going to be talking about Turn the Ship Around, which is a really interesting book about leadership. Don't switch off if you're not interested in leadership, there is so much here that is transferable. And the thing I really enjoyed about To Turn the Ship Around is that it is not a book that is telling you what to do. It is somebody reflecting on their own experiences, somebody thinking about failure, about intelligent failures, thinking about how you can reflect on situations that you have predicted will go one way and that end up going another way.
Dave and I explore how you can learn from that and how you can turn quite a dysfunctional disparate organisation into something that really works, an organisation which people are proud to be part of. And I found that really, really compelling from the perspective of being a leader, from the perspective of being a teacher. And also I think from the perspective of being within an organisation, what it is to have a leader-leader model rather than a leader-follower model. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and I've really enjoyed exploring it with Dave.
Dave an I mentioned some other brilliant resources
1. The Chimp Paradox by Steve Peters
2. The You are Not a Frog podcast https://youarenotafrog.com/
3. The Conversational Framework as described by Diana Laurillard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSP2YlgTldc
Find Dave's brilliant YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/GPTemplates -
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A warm welcome today to podcast legend and all round inspiration Dr Rachel Morris. Rachel is best known for hosting her own phenomenal podcast You Are Not A Frog https://youarenotafrog.com/ which helps people work smarter, beat burnout, think more and overthink less. Rachel is also a speaker, coach and former GP.
Find Rachel's coaching business Wild Monday here: https://www.wildmonday.co.uk/
We are talking about Elizabeth is Missing the wonderful novel by Emma Healey which was also adapted for TV starring Glenda Jackson. Told from the perspective of Maud, an elderly lady who we realise quickly is the ultimate "unreliable narrator" in that she has dementia. Friendship, dementia, dignity, carer stress, pragmatic soliutions all feature as well as this being a brilliant sort of a "whodunnit" (no spoilers in the episode we promise!
Rachel recommended Graham Allcott's The Productivity Ninja https://www.grahamallcott.com/books/productivity-ninja
and we also mentioned Being Mortal by Atul Gawande https://atulgawande.com/book/being-mortal/ -
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I've got a cracking episode coming up for you today. I'm delighted to be joined by Joe Thomas, a hospitalist, from Buffalo in New York to talk about the Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. I loved Abraham Verghese first novel Cutting for Stone more than I can begin to tell you and it's a book that's got a special place in my heart because it was the first book that we read as part of the medical humanities book club and which I set up twelve years ago and which is still running. I knew that Abraham Verghese had a new book out and I sensed it was going to be an absolute cracker but I hadn't got around to reading it and then I had an email from Joe asking had I read it yet and please could he come on and talk about it because he was thinking about it so much. This is a book set in India in the early twentieth century, taking us up through until the later twentieth Century. There's quite a lot of medicine in the book. Really credible medicine because Abraham Verghese is a wonderful novelist and he's also a doctor. So you don't need to get irritated by the medicine being wrong. There are themes around family, around education, about history, secrets, support, communities, intersectionality, medical negligence the end of an empire. Oh my goodness there is so much in this book and if you pick it up and you think "gosh it's very long", it flies by because it is absolutely absorbing. I loved it so much and I cannot tell you how much I've enjoyed talking to Joe today about it. -
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Today's episode is all about a very short and very powerful novel by Max Porter, Shy. In 122 pages Max Porter inhabits the mind of a very troubled teenage boy called Shy. Nicola Ennis, my guest, and I both have quite significant life experiences of working with children and young people think that this is probably the best insight into the mind of a troubled teenage boy that you could possibly wish to have. It is quite dark. It's also funny. It's just an incredible insight and I think there is so much to talk about in terms of how we respond to young people how we respond to young people in distress and what it takes to remain. The grown-up in a situation where a distressed young person is behaving in a way that you wish they weren't and to be honest, they wish they weren't too I really hope you're going to enjoy our conversation today.
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A warm welcome back to a previous guest today. It's a real joy to be talking to Professor Ellie Hothersall-Davis from the University of Dundee. We have come up with today six books which we think would be really, really good as reading material before starting a medical degree.
Maybe people listening who have got children or godchildren or nieces or nephews or next door neighbours who are planning to become doctors. Arguably actually perhaps becoming any sort of healthcare professional because I think the themes for all of these books are translatable across healthcare and Ellie and I wanted to think about what we could suggest to people to be reading that aren't textbooks that will give them enjoyment and escapism and help them to promote empathy, to think about things from another perspective, to lose themselves in a book whilst also being able to think more deeply about something they might never previously have considered. We've got six cracking books coming up today and I really hope that you are going to enjoy thinking about them.
The books we discussed:
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
The Cure for Good Intentions by Sophie Harrison
The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini
We also briefly mentioned the Beekeeper of Alleppo -
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A warm welcome back today to Victoria Kinkaid who's here to talk about Clytemnestra's bind by Susan C Wilson. This is a modern retelling of a story from Greek mythology that of Queen Clytemenestra , unwilling wife of Agamemnon. I really enjoyed my conversation with Victoria. If you've not come across her before he has been on the podcast before and she was here last year talking about a brilliant nonfiction title Half the Sky. Today we are talking fiction. We are talking Greek Mythology, we are talking about feminism, we are talking about the role of women in health care, we're talking about domestic abuse, we're talking about trauma and PTSD We talk about people pleasers, we talk about boundaries, we talk about so many things. It is a really really good book even for somebody like me who doesn't much like Greek mythology. -
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It's a warm welcome back today to Lizz Lidbury who joins me to talk about The Seven Imperfect Rules of Elvira Carr. This is such an accessible brilliant book. It's described in a lot of reviews as being for people who loved Eleanor Oliphant and I admit I did love Eleanor Oliphant but I'm not convinced that it is so similar to Eleanor Oliphant to need to be pigeonholed in that way.
Lizz and I have had a really enjoyable time talking about it thinking about the characters some of the wonderful cast within the book. We thought about the difference between listening to an audiobook when the characters have particular voices or are portrayed in particular ways by the narrator. We talk about social isolation. We talk about scaffolding young people. We talk about hopes and aspirations and about biscuits.
We also mentioned our love of this facebook Medics book group https://www.facebook.com/groups/135276503690822
We recommend the charity Autistic Girls Network which is a wonderful charity and maybe just like the one Elvira finds support from online https://autisticgirlsnetwork.org/
We talked about the recent meta-analysis of the power of reading fiction to improve empathy which can be found here
https://kar.kent.ac.uk/105137/1/AcceptedManuscript_260224.pdf -
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It's a welcome back for my guest this week! I'm delighted to have Jo Maher GP and active travel enthusiast from Sheffield one the podcast to talk about Selena Goddon's fabulous collection Pessimism is for Lightweights. Jo and I had a great conversation about how much we love these poems. We talk about activism. We talk about the tension that there sometimes is as a healthcare professional around "are we allowed to be activists" (the answer to that question is very definitely Yes) we talk about whether it is better to seek forgiveness than permission. We talk about using humour. We talk about agency. Talk about the frustrations of the world that we both currently live and practice in and how quiet activism might be the way forwards for people as they are building up their courage muscles. -
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Joining me today on the podcast is forensic psychiatrist Gill Patterson and we are talking about The Panopticon by Jenny Fagan. This is an absolutely brilliant book which I read in a day on holiday. There are many themes which are quite dark, quite thought provoking and I think Anais, the central character, will stay with me for a very very long time.
Gill and I talk about forensic services, especially forensic services for women. We talk about adverse life experiences we talk about normal responses to abnormal situations, we talk about the care system, we talk about connecting with young people and about seeing people holistically as their three dimensional selves. The Panopticon is a brilliant brilliant novel which I would really really recommend that you read and I thoroughly enjoyed talking to Gill about it today. -
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Welcome to Season 7 !!!!! I am so excited to launch this new season with an episode which is all about the Women's Prize shortlist.
I'm delighted to welcome book-tuber Sarah Cubitt to Bedside Reading. Sarah has a wonderful YouTube book channel called Your True Shelf. https://www.youtube.com/c/yourtrueshelf
Sarah and I are talking about the 6 books which have made this year's Women's Prize shortlist. The prize winner is announced on June 13th so if you are listening today, 4th June when it comes out you have nine days to get your way through the shortlist or perhaps to pick one of the ones that we discuss to read before the prize is announced and see if we were right in terms of the book that we would both most like to win. Interestingly we both picked the same one! Are we in line with the judges? who knows, we might need to wait to find out. It's been a real joy talking to Sarah and it's been really good fun to read books which have come off a shortlist and really to be thinking about their merits compared one with another.
The books on the shortlist are:
Brotherless Night by VV Ganeshananthan
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy
Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville
River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure
The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright
You can buy them all (and support my favourite bookshop Scarthin Books) here https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/scarthinbooks
Sarah also recommended https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/09/stay-with-me-by-ayobami-adebayo-review and https://www.thebibliophilegirluk.com/2018/05/big-bones-by-laura-dockrill/ both written by judges for this year's prize. -
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It's a first today and that is my first medical student guest on the podcast!! A huge welcome to Omar Al-Rubaie, a third year medical student at the University Of Sheffield who is here to talk about The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It's a first also because this is the first Douglas Adams I've ever read. I'd been aware of Hitchhiker's Guide for a very long time and I had never read it. I confess, I had never wanted to read it and as I was reading it in preparation for the podcast I was thinking "oh my goodness. What have I done". I will say I don't think I'm the target audience for the book and I didn't really get it.
You may be relieved to discover that after a conversation with Omar I've started to see that there is so much more in the book than I was getting out of first reading. And I suppose that's one of those reasons why reading books and talking about them is so enormously valuable to get the most out of them. Will I be going on to read the sequel? Pretty unlikely! Did I really enjoy my conversation with Omar? Oh my goodness Yes!! Whether you are a fan of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, somebody who loathes the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or somebody who listens to the podcast and has absolutely no idea what we're talking about so far, I hope you're going to enjoy this conversation. -
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It's an absolute joy today to welcome Dr Adaira Landry and Dr Resa Lewiss to Bedside Reading. They have written an absolutely phenomenal book which is called Microskills: small actions big impact. The tagline for the book is "buy this book on Friday be better at your job on Monday" and I think that this claim really really does live up to the hype.
This is a brilliantly accessible book. It is so practical. It is so readable. It has the potential to change anyone's work life and possibly even their home life as well. I've been thinking about who I want to recommend it to: I can't imagine anybody that wouldn't really benefit from it. I'm certainly going to be buying it for my new gp registrars and I do think if you've got somebody in your life who is about to start their career, maybe somebody who's just passed their finals because this episode is going out in the UK just at the time that people are getting their results and people are starting to think about starting their Foundation Program. This could be an absolutely fantastic book for those people to be thinking about how they can make the most of themselves keep themselves safe keep themselves well read the room understand the organisational culture and really get the most out of their life. It's a fabulous book I loved talking to Adaira and Resa and I really hope you'll enjoy listening to our conversation.
Find the authors on Twitter here
https://twitter.com/AdairaLandryMD
https://twitter.com/ResaELewiss
You might also enjoy Resa's podcast https://www.thevisiblevoicespodcast.com/ -
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A warm welcome today to Jordan Napier Morrow, staff development lead in the School of Medicine at Dundee University. We are talking about Richard's Shepherd's brilliant book Unnatural causes which is a memoir of one of Britain's most high profile forensic pathologists. There is an enormous amount in this book to take away: stories of cases we may have heard of, cases we won't have heard of but also interwoven is Richard Shepherd's own story how he became a pathologist, the impact of being a pathologist combining pathology with family life and some of his reflections on the effect that this job and this life has had on his mental health. It's a phenomenal book and I really really enjoyed talking to Jordan about it.
Follow Jordan on Twitter here https://twitter.com/jjnapier -
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A warm welcome today to Dani Hall who is here to talk about Donal Ryan's The Queen of Dirt Island . This is a book that I'd heard quite a lot about and not picked up until Dani suggested that I ought to read it. I started reading and had to text her after about 5 minutes to say "oh my goodness this is so good, why haven't I picked this up before?" so I really hope you're going to enjoy our conversation today. The book tells the story of four generations of women in a family in Ireland. We think about teenage pregnancy, we think about what it is to be a teenager, we think about the role of women of society, of the need for scaffolding, of wisdom and compassion. It's a brilliant book and I thoroughly enjoy talking to Dani about it.
Dani and I first connected via https://dontforgetthebubbles.com/ which is an amazing paediatric Free Open Access Medical Education resource. DFTB also run conferences and live events and I'm fortunate to teach on the MSc in Paediatric Emergency Medicine which Dani is a course director for https://www.qmul.ac.uk/postgraduate/taught/coursefinder/courses/paediatric-emergency-medicine-online-msc/ - Montre plus
