Iain Bamforth Knihy

Scattered Limbs is a collection of anecdotes, observations and opinions which restores a mythological dimension to the most obvious and yet enigmatic of subjects, the human body. In contrast to the utopian fuzziness offered by the WHO's definition of health - 'health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity' - Scattered Limbs gets down and dirty and hunts intellectual minotaurs all the way back to their obscure lairs and labyrinths in pre-Homeric Greece. Written over twenty years, its entries range from aphorisms to anecdotes, which in their strangeness and baroque memorability, sometimes resemble Borges' tales of imaginary beings - though the 'imaginary' beings here are often remarkable patients. The book moves between topics as diverse as Lao Tzu, Goya and his doctor, Rabelais and Rousseau, Plato's perfect human, the nocebo effect (dark twin of the placebo effect), aromatherapy, mosquitos, the TV series House, Franz Rosenzweig, Vincent van Gogh's painting of an onion, Prussian ideas of 'fitness', the Book of Job, depression as a media-disseminated 'folk illness' of the industrialised West, the Beatles' contribution to the invention of the CT scan, The Magic Mountain, Freud's nephew and PR guru Edward Bernays, and not least the idea of professionalism, including a provocative disquisition: 'What is a good doctor?'.

A sensuous, richly nuanced collection of essays for intellectual and emotional survival in this fractious age.

The Body in the Library provides a nuanced and realistic picture of how medicine and society have abetted and thwarted each other ever since the lawyers behind the French Revolution banished the clergy and replaced them with doctors, priests of the body. Ranging from Charles Dickens to Oliver Sacks, Anton Chekhov to Raymond Queneau, Fanny Burney to Virginia Woolf, Miguel Torga to Guido Ceronetti, The Body in the Library is an anthology of poems, stories, journal entries, Socratic dialogue, table-talk, clinical vignettes, aphorisms, and excerpts written by doctor-writers themselves. Engaging and provocative, philosophical and instructive, intermittently funny and sometimes appalling, this anthology sets out to stimulate and entertain. With an acerbic introduction and witty contextual preface to each account, it will educate both patients and doctors curious to know more about the historical dimensions of medical practice. Armed with a first-hand experience of liberal medicine and knowledge of several languages, Iain Bamforth has scoured the literatures of Europe to provide a well-rounded and cross-cultural sense of what it means to be a doctor entering the twenty-first century.

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 centers 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 hospitalized due to an overload of sublime Renaissance art.