A fierce, honest, elegant and often hilarious debunking of the great fallacies that drive modern medicine.
Seamus O'Mahony writes about the illusion of progress, the notion that more and more diseases can be 'conquered' ad infinitum. He punctures the idiocy of consumerism, the idea that healthcare can be endlessly adapted to the wishes of individuals. He excoriates the claims of Big Science, the spending of vast sums on research follies like the Human Genome Project. And he highlights one of the most dangerous errors of industrialized medicine: an over-reliance on metrics, and a neglect of things that can't easily be measured, like compassion.
'A deeply fascinating and rousing book' MAIL ON SUNDAY
'What makes this book a delightful, if unsettling read, is not just O'Mahony's scholarly and witty prose, but also his brutal honesty' THE TIMES
A brilliantly witty book about the intertwined lives of psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, surgeon Wilfred Trotter and the guru of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.
Welsh-born psychoanalyst Ernest Jones was Sigmund Freud's closest associate and most fervent disciple. Clever, self-confident and intensely ambitious, Jones promoted psychoanalysis as a kind of secular religion. Meanwhile, his intimate friend Wilfred Trotter - a celebrated surgeon who saved the life of George V, and who took on Freud as a patient during his London exile - refused to yield to the seductions of the new Freudianism. A quintessentially English figure, Trotter was unimpressed by slick medical careerists, distrusted grand theories and lacked pomposity and self-regard.
From the first psychoanalytic congress in Salzburg in 1908 to the illness of King George in the late 1920s and the meeting of Freud and Trotter in 1939, Seamus O'Mahony tells the story of these three figures and their intertwined lives with his customary wit and erudition. Not only the story of the development of psychoanalysis, this is a book about the sexual obsessions of intellectual and bohemian circles in London, Cambridge and Vienna, of Bloomsbury, of doctors in pursuit of wealth and fame. It covers a pivotal thirty years in European history, and reveals how and why the writings of a failed neurologist from Vienna became so influential.
Life and death in a modern hospital, from 'poet-physician' Seamus O'Mahony, the award-winning author of The Way We Die Now and Can Medicine Be Cured?
Seamus O'Mahony charts the realities of work in the 'ministry of bodies', that huge complex where people come to be cured and to die. From unexpected deaths to moral quandaries and bureaucratic disasters, O'Mahony documents life in the halls and wards that all of us will visit at some point in our lives with his characteristic wit and dry and unsentimental intelligence.
Absurd general emails, vain and self-promoting specialists, the relentless parade of self-destructive drinkers and drug users, the comical expectations of baffled patients: this is not a conventional medical memoir, but the collective biography of one of our great modern institutions - the general hospital - through the eyes of a brilliant writer, who happens to be a gifted doctor.
2021 Head of Zeus
A fierce, honest, elegant and often hilarious debunking of the great fallacies that drive modern medicine.
Seamus O'Mahony writes about the illusion of progress, the notion that more and more diseases can be 'conquered' ad infinitum. He punctures the idiocy of consumerism, the idea that healthcare can be endlessly adapted to the wishes of individuals. He excoriates the claims of Big Science, the spending of vast sums on research follies like the Human Genome Project. And he highlights one of the most dangerous errors of industrialized medicine: an over-reliance on metrics, and a neglect of things that can't easily be measured, like compassion.
'A deeply fascinating and rousing book' MAIL ON SUNDAY
'What makes this book a delightful, if unsettling read, is not just O'Mahony's scholarly and witty prose, but also his brutal honesty' THE TIMES
