Bedside Reading

Send us Fan Mail The Netflix adaptation of Alice Oseman's Heartstopper graphic novels was the highlight of my TV watching year last year and I was so delighted to realise they were based on a wonderful series of graphic novels. This winter is a tiny novella which packs a punch and has some of the most powerful "voice of the young person" writing I've encountered in a long while...

Send us Fan Mail This episode was planned anyway but it feels only right to share during Pride Month as part of the importance of us all reflecting on LGBTQI+ themes and health This Child of Ours  by Sadie Pearce was suggested to us by the parent of a trans child who had found the novel really reflective of their own experiences. Sadly this medical parent felt unable to breach their child's c...

Send us Fan Mail Described in a review as: 'An honest, brave and much needed account of what it feels like to live with severe social anxiety. Having a male writer dealing so openly with topics like social anxiety, shyness, introversion and sensitivity is sadly all too rare and makes this book all the more of a triumph.'  by Tom Falkenstein, Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapist & au...

Send us Fan Mail We tend to surround ourselves with people we identify with, in appearance, beliefs and perspective. This subconscious habit, known as homophily , occurs because it’s validating to have our own ideas reflected back to us by the people around us, whether it’s friends, family or colleagues. But the truth is that homophily significantly inhibits the success of a team. It was a treat t...

Send us Fan Mail This week I'm joined by Belfast GP Susan Buchanan to discuss Bruce Parry and Oprah Winfrey's bestselling book What Happened to You. This is an accessible and engaging book written in the format of stories and conversations between Dr Parry and Oprah which means that a lot of complex and deep information is made really clear and easy to follow. This is a book all about AC...

Send us Fan Mail This week a massive thank you and well done to Lewi Gee my amazing sound editor who tackled a recording which had been horribly messed up by a combination of technology failure and terrible Islay weather and my guest using a not very good satellite link! It's a huge pleasure to welcome back remote and rural GP Catriona Davis to talk about Barbara Kingsolver's newest nove...

Send us Fan Mail I'm joined this week by counsellor Bridget Hargreave https://www.cayatherapy.co.uk/bridget-hargreave to talk about Cariad Llloyd's https://twitter.com/ladycariad wonderful book You are not alone which builds on her superb podcast The Griefcast and is described by Phillipa Pearce on the cover as "the friend you need when you are grieving" This book is moving, pr...

Send us Fan Mail I'm joined this week by Victoria Kinkaid, military doctor, women's health enthusiast, feminist and host of the Virago Voices podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/virago-voices/id1518617892 We had a brilliant conversation about Half the Sky a book which is sadly just as relevant and current now as it was in 2009 when it was first published.   A review in the New...

Send us Fan Mail Illiyin Morrison is a midwife by background and now well known on instagram as @mixing-up-motherhood and working as a birth debrief facilitator  https://mixingupmotherhood.com/ find her brilliant instagram page here https://www.instagram.com/mixing.up.motherhood We got together to discuss Bessel van der Kolk's book " The Body Keeps the Score " as well as Illy's...

Send us Fan Mail How many times have we consoled ourselves with the truism "this too shall pass"? In the world of change which we all currently inhabit there's so much uncertainty and I was hugely reassured to read Julia Samuel's gorgeous book and realise that the experiences of my patients, my friends and I are not actually all that weird after all. I absolutely loved talking...

Send us Fan Mail Barrington Jedidiah Walker is seventy-four and leads a double life. Born and bred in Antigua, he's lived in Hackney since the sixties. A flamboyant, wise-cracking local character with a dapper taste in retro suits and a fondness for quoting Shakespeare, Barrington is a husband, father and grandfather - but he is also secretly homosexual, lovers with his great childhood friend...

Send us Fan Mail Tuesday 28th March 2023 marks the third anniversary of poet, writer, broadcaster and all round national treasure Michael Rosen's admission to hospital with Covid-19. It felt only right therefore to release this episode today. I'm talking to GP Kirsty Shires about Michael Rosen's wonderful Many Different Kinds of Love  which documents his experiences of that time. It...

Send us Fan Mail Imagine being a household name, a sporting hero and a member of England's world cup winning rugby team from 2003.  Imagine having no recollection at all of the tournament of all tournaments in your sparkling career. Imagine being unable to remember the names of your children or the name of your dog. Imagine realising this was preventable and that the game you loved, to which...

Send us Fan Mail I admit that when neonatologist Helen Chitty https://twitter.com/helenchitty4 got in touch to recommend The Well Gardened Mind  by Sue Stuart Smith and to ask if she could join me on Bedside Reading I approached the book with some initial scepticism.  Isn't gardening just outdoor housework? It turns out my initial apathy was matched by the author's when she had begun her...

Send us Fan Mail This week contains International Women's Day on March 8th and when I started talking to Benjamin Black about hsi stunning book about his time working for Medecins sans frontiers (MSF) in Sierra Leone it was clear this was going to be the right conversation to mark today. I was blown away by Benjamin's writing, the insight into a medical world I'd never encountered a...

Send us Fan Mail Rebecca Wait's fourth novel I'm sorry you feel that way is out in paperback on March 2nd.  Described by i-news as "one of the richest explorations of family dysfunction I’ve read", this is a fabulously funny and moving story of a family in all its shades of dysfunctionality.  It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me think.   It's a brilliant read and t...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Series 4 of Bedside Reading It is a pleasure and a privilege to welcome the one and only Dr Kathryn Mannix to talk about her phenomenal book With the End in Mind   which may well be the book I've most ever recommended to registrars, colleagues and students. I tried hard not to end up going all fan girl on her but it was hard work to hold it all in, she really is on...

Send us Fan Mail Today's episode, the final one of series 3,  is all about a topic which doesn't get spoken about enough: coercive control.  We've specifically chosen to release it today, Valentine's Day, because we know that underneath the public face of all too many "happy" relationships there's a darker story at play. Victoria Cilliers' chilling memoir I...

Send us Fan Mail Joanna Nadin's The Queen of Bloody Everything , is about mothers, daughters and how we can make many choices in life but can't choose where we come from. As Edie Jones lies in a bed on the fourteenth floor of a Cambridge hospital, her adult daughter Dido tells their story, starting with the day that changed everything. That was the day Dido - aged exactly six years and t...

Send us Fan Mail A young man has stopped breathing in a supermarket toilet. A pedestrian with a nasty head injury won’t let the crew near him on a busy road. A newborn baby is worryingly silent. An addict urinates on the ambulance floor when denied a fix. This is the life of an NHS ambulance paramedic. Jake Jones has worked in the UK ambulance service for ten years: every day, he sees a dozen of t...

Send us Fan Mail I'm so delighted that Kathleen Wenaden asked to come and talk about the beautiful, gentle evocative book with me because this has been one of my reading highlights in the past few weeks. This is a wonderful gentle record of a small world, centred around a small terraced house in the West Midlands and the diary of a year in the life of an invisible illness. The Guardian review...

Send us Fan Mail It was a really pleasure to talk to GP and writer Sophie Harrison about her book  The Cure for Good Intentions which was a BBC Radio 4 book of the week back in May 2022 and which is a fabulous insight into the storytelling world of medicine.  We talk about crossing over from arts to sciences and how the art of medicine and the storytelling is the most joyous part of what we do. Fo...

Send us Fan Mail Maggie O'Farrell is one of my favourite writers and it was such a pleasure to reread her memoir I am I am I am for todays episode when I'm discussing it with Sally Davies. We talk about where we read (in the lift at work anyone?!), what we read and why reading is so valuable to us both. We also explore  the risk-taking decisions of young brains, how common near death exp...

Send us Fan Mail Set Boundaries, Find Peace had a title which both intrigued and slightly scared me.  The author Nedra Glover Tawab is something of an instagram sensation, for very good reason. It was brilliant to connect with Aukland Nurse Educator, Erin Carn-Bennett to discuss boundaries and why health professionals are often so bad at them. If you are thinking about a New Year new you type of a...

Send us Fan Mail It's a funny time of year, one of endings and beginnings and what better way to mark the end of 2022 than to have some friends of the podcast, old and new to review their favourite books of 2022 and think about some to-read ideas for 2023.  Nine healthcare professional guests and I share some highlights and anticipated reads. A huge thank you to Pim Dhahan https://twitter.com...