Book review: Jed Mercurio: BODIES,J.Cape, London 2002

A breathtaking way to brush up your Medical English...

and pick up somemore while thoroughly enjoying this medical thriller... unputdownable!

Ever since I started to use Bodies in class, my students have loved reading parts of it. Suddenly the cases they have seen described in their medical textbooks come alive before their eyes in a vividly realistic setting.

Written by a former doctor at the time when he himself was still undergoing the process of training at a large clinical hospital, this novel gives you an insider’s view of hospital life, a world that outsiders are not normally allowed to see, a world that eventually changes the author in a way he could never have anticipated.

Illness & Death

The book starts with the very first day of our young doctor’s internship (Part 1, appropriately named The Killing Season), a period of confusion and helplessness which he mainly manages to survive by frequently consulting the little yellow book in his pocket,The Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine. In the course of the following two years he works himself through a maze of more or less unpredictable cases (most notably described: fulminant meningitis, cardiac arrest, fatal pulmonary embolism, anaphylactic shock brought on by administration of the wrong antibiotic, diabetic coma), which will all present him with invaluable professional and moral experience, finally enabling him to emerge a much better doctor, certainly, but also, more importantly, a much better person as well.

Ethics & the System

The ethical and moral dilemmas the author is faced with all have to do with how the system works, about which he says:

The system harms one in every ten patients who come into hospital because it’s too big and too old. Medical-school training is totally f*** up and people come on to the wards knowing practically nothing...No wonder mistakes are made... Consultants get appointed who haven’t seen enough clinical medicine or done enough operations. Doctors at every level make mistakes. And what are we going to do about it? Come clean and say the whole system’s a mess and 70 000 patients a year get killed because of it and another 200 000 a year get seriously harmed because of it? No one wants to hear that. The politicians don’t. The general public don’t. So what happens when something goes wrong? We cover it up, of course. Invariably, we succeed, unless someone decides to go and blow the whistle...

...which is exactly what he has the courage to do in Part 4 of the book, called Blowing the Whistle.

Another interesting ethical point illustrated is the doctor-patient relationship, too often mechanical, devoid of all warmth and caring. (Apropos caring, a joke from the text: Do you know why the ICU (=intensive care unit) has been renamed into ITU (=intensive treatment unit)? Because nobody cares.) So this is how our doctor reacts when Sally, a good friend of his, falls into a coma:

In looking down at Sally I feel a sense of absurdity. People I know are real people. They don’t get ill and die. The ones who come into the hospital from the outside to suffer and die are spectres from a virtual world without past or future or connection to me...

Sex & Language

Regarding ***, a fair warning. Those of you offended by strong, realistic language abundant in four-letter words, and rather graphic, detailed descriptions of sexual encounters should maybe stay away from Bodies. A pity, though, since even making love is described in strictly medical terms. I bet you have never come across something quite like this:

My hand flutters across her abdomen. The thin muscle twitches at my touch. Lying on her back her belly is a flat basin between the ridges of her lowest ribs and the crests of her hips and pubis. I trace a line along her linea alba down to her navel...My lips skim across the hard crest of her hip bone and follow upwards along her faint linea semilunaris to her ribs. I stroke each intercostal sulcus counting up to her breast...

I plant kisses down her neck, into her supraclavicular fossa, over the high margin of her clavicle and back to her breasts...

To get serious again: the main feature of this book that makes it so great for the purpose of acquiring Medical English is that it contains well over two hundred footnotes explaining every single anatomical structure, symptom, diagnosis, procedure and piece of equipment from the text, not to mention the rather complicated British hospital hierarchy.

In short, this book, simultaneously funny and scary, unfeeling and cynical on the one hand while deeply caring and ethical on the other, is a novel without a hero.Rather, the hero is medicine itself, medicine as it is practised, with all faults of the system as well as the wonderful things it can do.

Simply a must for all of you who at least sometimes in your busy schedules find the time to take up a book. You’ll be enjoying yourselves without having to feel guilty, because at the same time you’ll be doing wonders for your professional English!