Bedside Reading

Send us Fan Mail It's Valentine's Day this week and so what better way to celebrate than with a podcast that's all about sex! I'm delighted to be joined by Dr Naomi Sutton Consultant in Sexual Health and HIV at Rotherham, star of  series 1 and 2 of the E4’s ‘The Sex Clinic’ which “helps young people get their sex lives back on track” and ambassador for The Eve Appeal, a charity...

Send us Fan Mail A warm welcome this week to plastic surgeon Sindhoo Rangarajan who suggested to me a fascinating book which I would absolutely not have ever come across without her recommendation. https://www.elle.com/culture/books/a37976150/exclusive-excerpt-zara-stone-killer-looks/ Sindhoo's hero/role model was Dr Elsie Inglis who is someone I think we could all do with knowing more about:...

Send us Fan Mail What a treat to welcome Maddy Hover (aka the best read zombie fiction fan known to facebook) to Bedside Reading at long last. We are talking about The Good People by Hannah Kent and the challenges of raising children with a difference, the effects of poverty and judgement and why we want society to be so much better, kinder, less harsh than 1830s Ireland and how we fear this is no...

Send us Fan Mail Dr Jen Gunter OBGYN has got to be one of my favourite social media doctors. Straight talking, easy to understand and full of wisdom and evidence based advice.  Her book The Vagina Bible had been recommended repeatedly and it was great to have the push to read it when Catie Nagel contacted me to suggest we discussed it today. Catie is a GP with a medical education research interest...

Send us Fan Mail My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises by Fredrick Backman was, on first reading, my least favourite Backman novel.  Is that because the others I've read are so very brilliant indeed? Or because I was missing something? I'm delighted to welcome Sara from https://intensivegassingaboutbooksblog.wordpress.com/  to bedside reading to the podcast this week.   Sara is...

Send us Fan Mail Happy New Year and welcome to season 6 of Bedside Reading!! I so enjoyed meeting John Quin in 2022 at the DotMD festival. Our paths have crossed repeatedly on Twitter and then in person at Medicine Unboxed so it was a real treat to sit down together to record this episode about his memoir Medicine Man.   John is a retired endocrinologist with a second career as an arts writer. Fin...

Send us Fan Mail A reflective look back over 2023 and some thoughts for 2024 as I'm joined by friends of the podcast to think about their tops reads of the year and their most anticipated reads for 2023. Huge thank you to Claire McKie, Dani Hall, Anna Baverstock, Nik Kendrew, Nicola Davis, Selina Flinders, Alan Coss, Fran Boffey, Charley Baker and Derek Ochiai and Ellie Hothersall

Send us Fan Mail What a treat to welcome Catherine Bell and Stephanie Farrell Moore to Bedside Reading to talk about their wonderful small anthology of poetry by neurodivergent women  Kaleidoscopic Minds. Follow them on instagram here https://www.instagram.com/kaleidoscopic_minds_poetry/ Buy your copy here https://kaleidoscopicmindsuk.etsy.com/listing/1606941954 All proceeds go to Autistic Girls N...

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...