Why do we suffer, and how do we heal? How much of healthcare lies beyond procedural and readily defined fixes, and what is this vast but more elusive hinterland?

Such questions are vital to understanding how we may best engage with one another’s ill fate, vulnerabilities, and inevitable transience. How this is done very much reflects the culture of the time: all our desires, delusions, efficiencies, fears, and follies.

Patterns of healthcare reflect not just biomedical objective facts. They tell us quite as much about our shared yet individual humanity.

Here is an unusual and highly readable exploration of these issues: an anthology of essays sourced from a frontline medical practitioner’s notebooks, as he experienced his work changing over several decades. Lively vignettes capture the more intimate experiences of healthcare encounters and the enduring residues of meaning; perspectives varifocus between the personal, the professional and the cultural.

This book’s Leitmotif? Medicine’s undoubted modern bioengineering triumphs are often at the expense of our personal ecology - sharper and accelerating treatments displace and neglect our care; commodification is easier than comfort; and technical definition eclipses personal understanding. The price we pay for this loss of balance is heavy and wide, yet - like our industrialised environmental damage - its gathering momentum is insidiously treacherous.

Yet, as the stories here show, hope lies in reclaiming the centrality of personal relationships and understandings for our healthcare.

Icarus Plummeting.

Human or Cyborg?

Healthcare’s trajectory in our digital age.