Bodies (Paperback)

Welcome then, Jed Mercurio, a former doctor himself, delivering his own sharp commentary of life as a junior doctor at an NHS Hospital. With tones that clearly resonate of Samuel Shek's House of God, Mercurio offers readers a home brand of punchy writing with no less muck and grime.

Mercurio's nameless narrator journeys through the hospital, its corridors filled with corruption and cynicism, in search of an ideal world where patients improve and doctors romance nurses. Instead he encounters unbridled mendacity, botched medical errors and suffers his own relationship problems with his 'civilian' girlfriend. As readers, we gain insight into the narrator's internal moral, and emotion turmoil and see how this is translated not just physically (his childhood eczema resurfacing) but also into his work environment.

This book attempts to counter the deification of the medical profession and highlights the human nature of doctors, and how sometimes, even they make mistakes too. In an era of 'Fitness to Practise' it is also refreshing to see the author highlight the oft under mentioned issue of whistle-blowing.

On the upside, this book is a thoroughly entertaining yet chillingly accurate portrayal of less than perfect hospital life. With its easily accessible style, it serves as a potential warning to all medical students as to what the 'real world' of medicine is truly like, guts and all.

The only possible downside? It's been commissioned for a BBC Television Series

While Bodies is fictional, it's written by a former doctor and one can't help wondering if this is his way of blowing the whistle on his former colleagues. It charts one man's heartbreaking realisation that being a doctor is not the dream vocation he imagined it would be. As his idealism slips into despair, the only thing that keeps him going is a somewhat sordid affair with a young, engaged-to-be-married nurse.

If you're about to go into hospital or know someone who is, you might not feel comfortable reading this book. But if you believe in "truth" or just like being submerged in damn good fiction, you would be hard pressed to find a more interesting, page-turning book

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.