Bedside Reading

Send us Fan Mail I'm delighted to welcome the wonderful Andy Tagg, ED consultant (and part of the DFTB team who ate lego heads and calculated their FART score as the sieved their poo to work out how long it takes to pass a swallowed plastic toy https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/nov/27/shit-a-brick-doctors-swallow-lego-to-allay-parents-fears ) to Bedside Reading this week. Follow A...

Send us Fan Mail It's such a treat to welcome back Ana Sampson for a dive into ideas for your Jolabokaflod.  As happens every time I speak to Ana we set out to think about a few books - the brief today was 5 - and end up side tracked and delighted to talk about more. Ana's own poetry collection Gods and Monsters is definitely up there for me as a book to buy (or request...) You can buy y...

Send us Fan Mail Oliver Sacks classic book  The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat is one of the absolute classic texts in the genre of stories from the humanity of medicine. It's fascinating to go back to it with the mind of someone working in 2023. It was lovely to connect with Neurologist Louisa Kent to think about our responses to it and our perceptions of the way the book is written and...

Send us Fan Mail A confession, I don't like Greek mythology. AT ALL. I did however love this book both when I first read it 10 years ago and on re-reading for this podcast. Achilles, "the best of all the Greeks," son of the cruel sea goddess Thetis and the legendary king Peleus, is strong, swift, and beautiful, irresistible to all who meet him. Patroclus is an awkward young prince,...

Send us Fan Mail "It took 20 years,” writes Fergal Keane in The Madness, “before I came to the point of accepting I was addicted to war.” This extraordinary book by War Journalist Fergal Keane is an exploration of his journey, generational trauma, PTSD, addiction and so much more. It seems right to release this episode this week, with Armistice Day at the weekend and so much conflict and horr...

Send us Fan Mail It was a huge privilige to meet Rowena Christmas aka "the doctor" from Polly Moreland's wonderful book  A Fortunate Woman. Among other things we talk about John Berger's original book A Fortunate Man,  living and working locally to your practice, the joys of continuity, community and the wonderful weird world of being a GP. Follow Rowena on Twitter here:  https...

Send us Fan Mail It was an honour when paeditrician Cristina approached me on Instagram to tell me how much Loveless had meant to her when she listened to it by accident on a long commute and suddenly jigsaw pieces of her own life fell into place. We talk about the importance of representation in fiction, the spectrum of sexuality and gender identity and what it means to be asexual (which includes...

Send us Fan Mail When Claire McKie recommended Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Remen to me I realised she wasn't the first person who'd suggested it and somehow it had drifted down my to-read pile.  I'm actually embarrassed it took me so long to realise it was almost everything I'd been looking at in a book to dip in and out of and to recommend endlessly to others. There's...

Send us Fan Mail What a book! Anna Kent's  Frontline Midwife blew me away.  Getting to meet her to record this conversation was just phenomenal.  Her publishers blurb reads: "At twenty-six years old, Anna Kent helped a woman deliver her baby in a tropical storm by the light of a headtorch. At age thirty she would be responsible for the female health of 30,000 Rohingya refugees in Banglad...

Send us Fan Mail Ash Bainbridge is an agender parent, student midwife, and advocate for language as safety, progress, and glue. They join me today to discuss Dr Meera Shah's phenomenal book "you're the only one I've told - stories of abortion". We talk about the potential taboos that still abound in maternity care, the importance of hearing intersectional stories from a ra...

Send us Fan Mail Hollie McNish https://holliepoetry.com/ is a poet, performer and writer.  Her collection Slug (and other things I've been told to hate) made me laugh, cry, rage and so much more. Her instagram is a joy to behold https://www.instagram.com/holliepoetry/ I loved talking to Sarah Goulding about it and talking about life, relationships, parenting, growing up, swearing, being femal...

Send us Fan Mail It's a bit nerve wracking when you welcome another podcast host to guest - this week was a joy though as I'm talking to Dr Jane Currie host of   https://uk-podcasts.co.uk/podcast/conversations-in-fetal-medicine about the brilliant short novel  Wonder   by RJ Palacio We explore themes around kindness, accessibility, visible difference and bullying among others. We also ta...

Send us Fan Mail Today's episode was made possible by the power of the platform formerly known as Twitter (which I can't bear to refer to by its new name and logo but that's a whole other story) I was blown away by Tim Ewins' novel  Tiny Pieces of Enid  which I was given by a friend a few weeks ago.  As the excessive extrovert that I am, I NEEEDED to talk about it and turned to...

Send us Fan Mail Queenie Jenkins is a twenty-five-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places…including several ha...

Send us Fan Mail ‘Ultimately, my experiences as a mental health nurse have taught me that we should judge less and open our hearts more.’ Belinda Black was just seventeen years old when she began working as a nursing assistant at the large and foreboding ‘madhouse’, as it was then known to the villagers of her hometown in the north of England. Following in the footsteps of her mother, she went on...

Send us Fan Mail There are few people on #MedTwitter as passionate about children's books as I am but today I have completely met my match in the utterly fabulous Bipolar Doc.  If you follow her already she will need no introduction as one of the most thoughtful, thought provoking, kind and reflective accounts to follow. If not, find her here: https://twitter.com/doc_bipolar We are talking ab...

Send us Fan Mail The Lost Properties of Love  by Sophie Ratcliffe defies classification. This is a gorgeous book, part memoir, part journey with links and musings on many other books, themes and ideas. GP Sue Potter joined me to talk about it. We talk about heroes, being a fangirl, journeys, reflections on life, motherhood, success and so much more. Follow the author of the book, Sophie Ratcliffe...

Send us Fan Mail Delia Owens' 2018 coming of age novel Where the Crawdads Sing has sold an incredible 18 million copies and was released as a film in 2022.  I'm joined this week by GP Rosemary Hickman to discuss ACEs, being transported to another world, illiteracy, secrets and so much more. If you've not already read the novel it would be a great pick for a summer holiday read. The...

Send us Fan Mail Bonnie Garmus' debut novel about chemist Elizabeth Zott, co-narrated by Six-Thirty the dog who must be one of the most fabulous anthrpomomorphised animals in a novel continues to be THE book club book of the moment. Found on every bookshops bestseller shelf, impossible to miss in the supermarket or in airport bookshops it sold 220, 000 copies in hardback in the UK and appears...

Send us Fan Mail I loved talking to London GP Eugenia Lee about Everything Everything  by Nicola Yoon, In this fabulous YA novel we meet Madeline Whitter who spends her whole life inside a bubble, with her mother.  Madeline has a rare immune deficiency and cannot remember ever leaving her home.  Shortly after Madeleine’s 18th birthday, a new family moves in next door. A young and seemingly depress...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Season 5 - I'm so excited!! 85 episodes, 4 seasons complete and now it's time for season 5.   I'm joined today by `Nuthana Bhayankaram, Vice President of the Medical Women's Federation and host of their podcast.  We are talking about Nuthana's favourite novel: Pride and Prejudice and I have to confess it's the very first time on this podcas...

Send us Fan Mail A cracking novel to finish season 4. This is a book about community, about values, ambition, and also about hockey (but do not let that put you off if you aren't into sport).  It's the first in a trilogy by the brilliant Fredrik Backman and is pretty much unputdownable. Francesca  Boffey and I have incredibly overlapping taste in books and it's taken us such a long...

Send us Fan Mail It's a big "welcome back!!" this week to Charley Baker, Associate Professor of Mental Health at The University of Nottingham and self confessed "book pusher". We're talking about a fabulous collection of short stories titled Cat Brushing written by retired Psychotherapist Jane Campbell. We talk about the invisibility of older women, taboo subjects, th...

Send us Fan Mail A lone astronaut. An impossible mission. An ally he never imagined. Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission - and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he'...

Send us Fan Mail Nancy Kline's Time to Think is probably the non fiction book which has most changed my clinical and teaching/mentoring practice ever. It was a huge treat to discuss it with Martin Billington and to discover it had had a similar effect on him. Focussing on the principles that "The quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first. The quality...