Secrets from the Black Bag ...
... where the science that is medicine bumps thrillingly against human fear, passion, despair and hope.
There is a whiff of pipe-smoke on colonial balconies, a sepia-tinted glimmer of grateful patients and be-chauffeured physicians. There is no political correctness, yet to be invented ...
Secrets from the Black Bag presents doctors hurrying through the night, from the early to late 20th century, from Pakistan to Tanganyika, from Scotland to New Zealand, all over the planet. They carry little black bags into the private worlds of people struggling with the business of living and dying and trying to make sense of things.
The stories are based upon interviews over ten years with general practitioners and their spouses, on top of whose testimony the author has constructed fiction.
Come visit ...
• A perplexed forester in the Scottish Highlands who confronts love for the first time, gun in hand
• A rebellious London nurse who stitches up an arrogant surgeon near the Benin border
• Mrs Babbadge, whose anosmia inures her to the mouldering stench of the home she shares with a rotting husband and two frenetic terriers
• A 5-year-old who has died alone in a hovel in the middle of the night, killed by the negligence of a psychopathic stepfather
Book Review
Christopher Bantick, Sunday Tasmanian, 19.2.06
Secrets From the Black Bag
by Susan Woldenberg Butler, Royal College of General Practitioners, $39.95
DOCTORS are often repositories of memorable stories. Maybe it is something to do with the nature of their work as much as what they are told.
Secrets From the Black Bag, by Tasmanian writer Susan Woldenberg Butler, is a novel with a difference.
The book is comprised of 11 voices of family doctors. They come together in this waiting room of a book and reveal their worst fears, their joys and mistakes.
Although Butler lives in Tasmania, the book was published in London and the emphasis is on capturing and celebrating the lives of doctors working in remote areas around the world.
Terrific and original. Available in Hobart bookshops. |
More reviews of Secrets from the Black Bag
Dr Rupal Shah MRCGP, Honorary Editor The New Generalist
Amazon customer reviews
Also on the recommended reading list of the Association of Course Organisers— 'Educating the future GP'
— in the UK
Also available from
Online: Amazon and Royal College of General Practitioners Online Bookshop.
In Australia:
Petrarch’s Books petlau@bigpond.net.au, Fuller’s Books, Birchalls and the Hobart Bookshop.
|
