Bedside Reading

Send us Fan Mail 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 bo...

Send us Fan Mail 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....

Send us Fan Mail 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 bo...

Send us Fan Mail 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 tha...

Send us Fan Mail 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 neig...

Send us Fan Mail 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 l...

Send us Fan Mail 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 pigeonho...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 fore...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 ver...

Send us Fan Mail 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 brilli...

Send us Fan Mail 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, case...

Send us Fan Mail 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 re...

Send us Fan Mail Today is a special episode of the podcast where I'm welcoming friends, leaders from all sorts of branches of healthcare to share a book that means something to them about leadership. We would like to dedicate this episode to the memory of Dr Jenny Vaughan who died recently. She was perhaps best known for her campaigning work with Doctors Association UK, https://www.dauk.org/...

Send us Fan Mail It's a real honour today to welcome Professor Chloe Orkin to Bedside Reading . Chloe  is a researcher, an HIV specialist, a doctor, and an unwell woman and we talk about what that means in the context of Eleanor Cleghorn's brilliant book Unwell Women: a journey through medicine and myth in a man-made world. We talk about feminism, we talk about medical heroes,  we talk a...

Send us Fan Mail A warm welcome today to Ben Allen, a GP from Sheffield who is here to talk to me about Amy Edmondson's second book The Right Kind of Wrong which is all about celebrating and learning from failure. Failure is something that health care professionals are not particularly good at.  It's something that we are so often afraid of. So frequently people talk about airline safety...

Send us Fan Mail As many regular listeners may know I absolutely love talking to authors about their books, especially healthcare professional authors and today is one of those episodes. I am so delighted to welcome Leah Hazard to the podcast to talk about her book Womb: the inside story of where we all began which is a phenomenal book literally for anybody. If only we could get this book into the...

Send us Fan Mail It's a joy today to welcome back Kirsty Shires to Bedside Reading. Kirsty and I first connected last year over Michael Rosen's Many Different Kinds of Love and she emailed me a few weeks ago to tell me about a book that she thought I ought to read which actually I had read before many years ago!  I've absolutely loved coming back to it.  Anne Fadiman's The Spir...

Send us Fan Mail  I'm delighted to welcome Ellen Welch, GP and writer to today's epsiode of Bedside Reading. Ellen's book Why Can't I see my GP: the past present and future of General Practice came out in February this year and feels such a topical read with everything that's been going on at the moment with the GP contract referendum.  If you are a GP you might well enjoy...

Send us Fan Mail A warm welcome today to Alan Shirley GP and Medical Educator to talk about A Fortunate Man: The story of a country doctor. The seminal John Berger and Jean Mohr book which has to a certain extent stood the test of time and has very much been the classic book mentioned when people talk about medical humanities or about books that relate to GP training. It's not a book just for...

Send us Fan Mail Dr Lucy Pollock's The Book About Getting Older has got to be one of the most compassionate, wise and useful books I have read. It was a delight to be joined by Lauren Wallis, a GPST2 who has moved from being a gynaecologist with a single system focus to a most excellent generalist with a newfound enthusiasm for frailty.

Send us Fan Mail Imagine you could be rid of your sadness, your anxiety, your heartache, your fear. Imagine you could take those feelings from others and turn them into something beautiful. Lynx is a Grief Nurse. Kept by the Asters, a wealthy, influential family, to ensure they’re never troubled by negative emotions, she knows no other life. When news arrives that the Asters’ eldest son is dead, L...

Send us Fan Mail Ian Walsh is a Surgeon, psychosexual therapist, academic, musician and an alcoholic. We are talking about Ian's phenomenal book. The Belly of the Whale . It's quite hard to describe this book other than as the rawest most honest warts and all account of his recovery from addiction. There is so much to think about and I'm almost embarrassed to say how much I enjoyed...

Send us Fan Mail Today's book is a slightly different type of book to actually almost anything that I've ever read before Kinder scout the people's mountain by Ed Douglas and John Beattie looks like a coffee table book. It is big. It is full of absolutely beautiful photography but also some incredibly accessible and interesting prose about the social history and the environmental hi...