We’re excited to announce that today you can buy Doctors Dissected in paperback. Doctors Dissected by Martin Scurr and Jane Haynes features a new forward by Professor Mike Pringle, former President of the Royal College of General Practitioners.

‘Gritty and raw…a profound and intimate examination  of the life of a doctor’

TELEGRAPH

‘This wonderfully readable and unusual book is personal, conversational, unpredictable … it leaves one wanting to be part of a crusade to win doctors more time to be everything they want – and need – to be’

OBSERVER

‘Doctors speak in their own words in this fascinating book, and the result is a provocative insight into bodies and souls’

HILARY MANTEL

This is a ‘story’ book about medicine, body, mind, doctors and caprices of human nature written by an experienced doctor (Martin Scurr), who has seen every untidy vagary of disease, and a psychotherapist (Jane Haynes), who has listened to personal narratives that rival the visceral emotions of King Lear. Doctors – who at their most profound are mercurial messengers between life and death, and who at a more comedic level must suffer our jiggling body parts – are also vulnerable men and women struggling to make sense of their existence.

Through a series of candid and deeply personal interviews, psychotherapist Jane Haynes lifts the ‘mask’ and explores what draws someone to this vital profession and doctors, practitioners of all ages, both NHS and private, reflect on their lives. They explore their relationship with their own health and those around them. They discuss the restructuring of the job, how training, changing medical practices, new guidelines, shifting working hours and suffocating admin levels have all impacted – positively and negatively – on the doctor’s relationship with the patient. And they consider their own, often complicated and tortuous journeys into this most fascinating of occupations.

In Doctors Dissected Haynes and Scurr steal behind cultural issues into the heartlands of doctors who are drawn to a life in medicine, and conduct an autopsy as to the consequences of choosing a profession in which the practitioner is constantly being faced with lonely decisions that very often are a matter of life and death.

About the authors: 

Martin Scurr FRCP, FRCGP was educated at Stonyhurst College and Westminster Medical School. He commenced private practice in the centre of London, was the opening Medical Director of St John’s Hospice at the Hospital of St John & St Elizabeth, subsequently appointed as Physician to Westminster Cathedral taking responsibility for the care of many senior Catholic Clergy leading to a lifetime commitment to the care of those leading religious lives, of whatever denomination. Following appointment as Chairman of the

Independent Doctors Forum in 2003, he was appointed as medical columnist for the Daily Mail.

Jane Haynes originally trained as a Jungian psychoanalyst but then ‘defected’ and now refers to herself as a relational psychotherapist who works primarily through ‘Dialogue’. She has a private practice with her daughter Tanya in Marylebone. She is a consultant to the Eastern European Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies in St Petersburg and is a member of the SITE for contemporary psychoanalysis. In

2008 her book Who is it that can tell me who I am? was shortlisted for the PEN J.R. Ackerley literary autobiography prize.

Martin Scurr and Jane Haynes are reading at Oxford Literature Festival on 9 April 2016. You can buy Doctors Dissected from Quartet Books here, or  buy it from Amazon here.