Description

Life and death in a modern hospital, from 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 doctor.

Publisher Review

PRAISE FOR SEAMUS O'MAHONY: '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 ... [He] is a wise consultant towards the end of his career telling us what he wished he had known at the beginning' The Times. 'This is an exceptionally strong polemic - one that might even persuade Miley Cyrus to start eating wheat again' * Sunday Business Post *