A Doctor's Dictionary: Writings on Culture and Medicine

In this pithy abecedarium, doctor and poet Iain Bamforth takes a close look at the conflict of values embodied in what we call medicine – never entirely a science and no longer quite the art it used to be. Bamforth brings his wide experience of medicine around the world, from the high-tech American Hospital of Paris to the community health centres of Papua, together with his engaging interest in the stranger manifestations of medical matters in relation to art, literature and culture – such as the mysterious ‘Stendhal’s syndrome’, which caused 106 tourists in Florence to be hospitalised due to an overload of sublime Renaissance art. 'Many of the most interesting moments in A Doctor's Dictionary are thrown up almost in passing, such as the specifically English nature of "fairness" as a concept, the concordance of Pasteur's germ theory with his hatred of mass society, and Hitler's possibly life-changing experience of being treated for "hysterical blindness" in the First World War [...] a cabinet of curiosities with a more serious underlying theme of humanity in medicine'. - 'Humane Acts',Times Literary Supplement 11.12.2015.

About the Author :
Iain Bamforth grew up in Glasgow and graduated from its medical school. He has pursued a peripatetic career as a hospital doctor, general practitioner, translator, lecturer in comparative literature, and latterly public health consultant in several developing countries, principally in Asia. His four books of poetry were joined by a fifth, The Crossing Fee, in 2013. His prose includes The Body in the Library (Verso, 2003), an anthology of modern medicine as told through literature, The Good European (Carcanet, 2006), a collection of writings on European literary history and Scattered Limbs (Galileo, 2020), a “dreambook” about medicine and modernity. His interest in the ars vivendi continues in his latest Carcanet book Zest: Essays on the Art of Living (2022), which goes from discussing an early modern instar of Google World to his own travels in Indonesia. Other topics include “Balzac, Bowie, communication theory, Kleist, olive trees and olive oil, the blueness of the sky, Lou Andreas-Salomé, ferns, Pessoa’s Lisbon, noise and silence, Wittgenstein and photography, Leipzig, craft traditions, Tobias Smollett and the quasi-Swiftian humour of the Book of Jonah” (to quote from the TLS review). Several of his wide-ranging essays and reviews can be read on his website.Visit Iain Bamforth's website.