- Paperback: 368 pages
- Publisher: Jonathan Cape (7 Mar 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0224061976
- ISBN-13: 978-0224061971
- Product Dimensions: 21 x 13.6 x 3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,441,024 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Bodies
and over 900,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
The unnamed narrator of Jed Mercurio's Bodiesis a newly qualified house officer in a busy city hospital. He arrives with his ideals intact and a vision of what his career in medicine will be. Within a short time the relentless procession of sick and damaged patients, the long, wearying hours he is obliged to work, the cynicism of his colleagues and the constant presence of death and disease take their toll. His idealism vanishes. He looks the other way when senior doctors are negligent or treat patients with contempt. He suffers guilt when a terrible mistake of his own is routinely covered up. His only escape is an intense sexual relationship with a student nurse. Sex is as clinically described in Bodiesas the indignities that age and accident inflict on the body. Mercurio wants to replace the melodrama of TV hospital series in which square-jawed doctors and glamorous nurses battle heroically against sickness and disease. In order to do so, he spares the reader few of the physical details that accompany illness and the body's disintegration. In pursuit of realism he peppers his text with medical slang and jargon, carefully annotated and explained in footnotes. What he has produced, however, is not realism but an inverted version of the melodrama. Instead of everything finally turning out well, the reader knows that, in this novel, everything will turn out very badly indeed. In place of square-jawed doctors saving the sick, Mercurio gives us drug-popping cynics exchanging the blackest of banter over dying patients. Melodrama it may be but, as the book's narrator seeks redemption by turning whistle-blower on hospital practices, it is very gripping melodrama.--Nick Rennison
Book Description
An incredibly powerful and disturbing novel about a junior hospital doctor. The first novel by the writer of Cardiac Arrest.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential, although scary, reading for all medical students,
By A Customer
This review is from: Bodies (Paperback)
Wow, I could not put this down. As a medical student and a part time healthcare assistant I am aware of two views of the medical profession and found this book to be very accurate in terms of interstaff relationships and attitude. The thoughts and inexperience of the newly qualified doctor are vividly portrayed, although this may scare some medical students (and members of the general public) having experienced working in a hospital myself I feel these should serve only to prepare for what is to come, not to put students off. The book is also very accessable to the general public as all specialised terms are explained and the story is great, enough to maintain interest without full knowledge of every procedure involved.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
No more 'authentic' than any of the soaps,
By
This review is from: Bodies (Paperback)
The scariest thing about this book is the final sentence on the back-cover blurb: "...(a) disturbingly authentic dispatch from the frontline of hospital life". Jed Mercurio has made a name for himself by tapping into the recognition that hospital soaps used to portray a one-sided, glamorous view of hospital life, and deliberately portraying the other side: medical blunders, cover-ups, callous doctors etc. This does not make his book 'authentic'. Rather, it is equally one-sided - he presents a view that is jaundiced, pessimistic and ulimately hopeless. Just as the soaps cram far more heroism into hospital life than really occurs, so he crams far more lethal negligence and cynicism than really occurs. For most of us in the NHS, the truth lies somewhere between: we have seen (and perhaps made) both disastrous blunders and strokes of life-saving genius, amidst long stretches of routine; we have felt both despair and pride. Dr Mercurio's book may be authentic for him, but I find it hard to imagine he is in a majority.The medicine itself is not always authentic either. I don't know of any NHS hospital (and I've worked in a few) where the medical SHO prescribes for and extubates patients on ICU. And as for a patient waking up immediately after a twenty-minute cardiac arrest (due to 'massive MI') - well, it could be straight off Holby City. Like a previous reviewer, I found the footnotes excessive. Maybe a non-medical reader would find them valuable, but even he/she would probably have spotted something wrong with Dr Mercurio's definition of the 'mons vaginis'. On the plus side, Dr Mercurio makes some trenchant points: traditional medical school training is not well-geared to the practicalities of being a junior doctor; and hospitals have not been good at detecting (let alone correcting) weaknesses in the system that allow errors to be made. In these and other matters he has caught something of the Zeitgeist of the current NHS, which gives his book a topical bite. He does also have an ear for a truly poetic turn of phrase (the 'lithium wind' will stick in my memory for some time), and his prose is generally engaging. The book inevitably invites comparison with 'The House of God', and unfortunately fares badly: it is as if Dr Mercurio has deliberately set out to write an NHS equivalent, and has succeeded so well that it might as well be a clone. It's all there: the worldly-wise role model, the suicidal colleague, the consultant obsessed with post-mortems and dress code, the wisecracks, the desperate sex (which becomes quite tedious eventually), even the semi-redemptive ending. 'Bodies' offers nothing new over its American predecessor, but is equally readable. In short, to any aspiring doctor, medical student or interested layman, I'd say: read it by all means, but don't take it too seriously.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Bodies (Paperback)
Anyone who saw "Cardiac Arrest" would have a good idea what to expect. This is incredibly accurate; it encapsulates the entire ethos of hospital life. I can't understand why other reviewers say it isn't true to life - maybe not every hospital all the time - but everything is verifiable, even down to patients being referred to by their condition. It happens! Utterly brilliant. If you don't like it, watch "Casualty" instead. Quick Nurse, the screens!It's about time that Colin Douglas's books were reissued - along similar lines but lighter.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
