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thank you sooo much for this post...im finding it very difficult to read right now but i found the audio book on YouTube...ill listen for as long as i can cuz the intro sounds very interesting...thanks again...and heres the link cuz people need each other to evolve

Feast your eyes by Myla Goldberg

Angels and Demons by Dan Brown

The Hobbit

To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

Reader's Digest, May 2013 edition.

The Waves - Virginia Woolf

pdf : The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy

mind the word "politics"

The Fellowship of the Ring - Tolkien

The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII, edited by Karl Edward Wager.

Horror anthology from 1980. The fiction in this series of books and like anthologies have been very influential on my appreciation of horror fiction, and indeed on my own writing. A real treat to read this stuff from years ago.

Can Medicine Be Cured?, Seamus O’Mahony’s latest book is a very readable excoriation of contemporary medicine which appears to have lost its way. As the medical profession endeavours to manage increasing life expectancy and societal consumerism we become careless of things that can’t be measured like compassion and professionalism thus allowing managers, politicians and our patients to make anti-harlots of us all (more on that later).

The first part of the book covers the ‘golden years of medicine‘, the 50 years or so ending in the 1980s when, like the author, I worked in the NHS doing 1 in 2 on calls; not appreciating this might be as good an era for the medical profession as any before or since. O’Mahony then sets out contemporary medicine’s seemingly impossible challenges, noting the pointless progression of academic and research medicine influenced by Big Pharma. He is clearly exasperated by expensive follies such as the Human Genome Project with its, to date at least, limited application compared to the resources invested.

O’Mahony scrutinises data collection, application and the use of population studies; his account of The Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry was particularly interesting, if again, disheartening. Like many, I had followed this enquiry of unprecedented mortality and accusations of institutional cruelty and callousness with alarm and accepted the damning conclusions of the Francis Report. Maybe I have to rethink this all again.

O’Mahony extrapolates politician Stanley Baldwin’s adage about the press (being like harlots exercising power without responsibility) concluding that doctors are now in the invidious position of being anti-harlots, carrying responsibility without power; in contrast to our patients who are now consumers with rights but no responsibility. This description delighted but dismayed me; it is just so apt.

At times the book becomes a bit of a rant but, sadly, I didn’t detect the author feeling any better after getting it all off his chest. However, it did make me feel better by articulating my own discomfort with our profession’s preoccupation with medical metrics and my increasing misgivings about protocol-driven medicine.

By this stage, more than three-quarters through, I was feeling the need for some relief from this brutal appraisal and ready for ‘the cure’ when came a chapter on medical humanities. I read on eagerly; this is my field, I try to get medical students to engage with the arts and humanities to better understand the state of contemporary medicine and society. However, O’Mahony is dismissive of this approach with its emphasis on enhancing empathy:

^ That's an unattributed copy/paste from - Books: Can Medicine Be Cured? The Corruption Of A Profession

Dombey And Son (Charles Dickens)

I wasn't expecting much, not being a great fan of what I've read of his books so far - I like them but he often tries to be a bit too clever at the expense of clarity, at least to my eyes. But Dombey seems different.

Suddenly in chapter XXXIII he shifts the scene and presents characters he's not written about before. Nothing unusual about that, many authors do it. But his style of writing changes also - less humour, more sensitivity, and somehow just different, as though written by a different person. Almost as if he'd just tried a new recreational drug. Not that there's much evidence that he was a junkie. His use of such things was probably within the common practices of the time. He was probably just very talented at writing.

Regeneration by Pat Barker

Daughter of the Deep by Rick Riordan

Dunno if this has any relation to Camp Half-Blood, though. :/