Recent Books
Becoming a Doctor wil be published Spring 2026. It is the inside story of one person’s transformation from naive student to professorial physician. It will make compelling reading for anyone who, when seeing a doctor, has wondered ‘How did you get to be that way?’ Becoming a Doctor describes what it feels like to be transformed from a naïve student into a professorial physician. This very personal ‘re-membering’ evokes the joys, absurdities and frustrations of medical work. The author observes his younger self’s efforts to regulate feelings and to communicate with patients and colleagues in prescribed ways. The relationships with patients he describes often feel like performances in which the doctor’s self need play little part. Other ways of being a doctor are hard to imagine within a hospital, where patients’ day-to-day concerns are invisible. Doctors in the 1960s, as now, were more focused on disease than on illness or suffering. They avoided thinking about death and were curiously silent about healing, recovery or rehabilitation. Becoming a Doctor shows how difficult it is for a young person to resist the pressures of history and culture. These pressures are described from the inside, along with medicine’s often puzzling pleasures. Key selling points Presents a sometimes affectionate, sometimes scathing inside story of medical education and its effects on students and doctors Raises troubling questions about the mentality and practice of a modern doctor Suggests that medicine’s current limitations, such as its naivety about psychology, have long histories Exposes medicine’s reluctance to reflect on itself and escape its traditional boundaries
Between Sickness and Health is about illness rather than disease, and recovery rather than cure. The book argues that illness is an experience, represented by the feeling that ‘I am not myself’. From the book’s phenomenological point of view, feelings of illness cannot be ‘unreal’ or ‘fake’, whatever their biological basis, nor need they be categorised as ‘physical’, ‘psychosomatic’ or ‘psychiatric’. The book challenges the disease-centred ethos of medicine and medical education. It demonstrates that a clearer conception of illness, as distinct from disease, is therapeutic. The feeling that ‘I am once again myself’ can return, in some degree, whatever state the body is in. Resilience becomes more available when it is seen as a set of personal skills that can be developed, rather than as an inborn trait. Possibilities of wellness are enhanced by recognising that medical and other therapies can either support or impede recovery, as can human relationships and the socio-political environment. The book’s many clinical examples are drawn from the author’s broad experience as a neurologist, rehabilitation physician and systemic family therapist. Between Sickness and Health will be useful for students, practitioners and academics, and also for anyone who has been or might one day be ill.
due Spring 2026
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS or ME) is a problematic diagnosis which can be interpreted in conflicting ways by doctors, patients and others. Meanings of ME signals a paradigm shift in thinking about the illness by providing fresh perspectives from doctors, clinicians and those who have personal knowledge of CFS/ME.
My Writing Story
I am an ex-doctor, and an active family therapist. A bit of background might explain what and how I write.
Before arriving at Cambridge to begin a degree in history I abruptly decide to become a doctor, which requires me to switch from one kind of writing to another. A historian has personal opinions and doubts, if not emotions, but a clinical scientist is supposed to be an invisible recorder of facts. Rule number one: never say 'I'. You'll see the sort of thing if you loo at my academic website.
I stop being a doctor in 2013 but am can’t stop thinking about medicine. The result is three books (described on the BOOKS page). The first of these, Meanings of ME (Palgrave 2015), is an academic multi-author work. It is about chronic fatigue syndrome or ME. In one of the chapters I break science’s taboo and use the first person singular. How could I not, in a book with meanings in its title?
Next is Between Sickness and Health (Routledge 2019), which rethinks the assumptions doctors and their patients make about illness and wellness. There is more ‘I’ in this book, because its ideas stem from a lifetime of personal practice.
The latest book, due in the Spring of 2026, is Becoming a Doctor. Re-Membering a Medical Education (First Hill Books). It is written for anyone who wonders why doctors are the way they are. Part of the answer comes from describing what medical education and practice has done to me, personally. But it’s not a memoir in the narrow sense. Being a family therapist as well as an ex-physician makes it necessary to think in terms of relationships. Becoming a Doctor is as much about the context in which students, doctors and patients learn about illness as it is about me personally. Besides relationships, the other constant is history. Just as each of us is made of what we are becoming, so is modern medicine itself. Historical context profoundly influences meaning.
The WRITING page houses various pieces of writing, some with origins in my work as a clinical academic and some that link with my identity as a practising family therapist.
The last section of the website is a BLOG. I will be happy if you give me your thoughts about any of this, because even a single thoughtful reader makes writing worthwhile. The best reward of all is a creative conversation, so I will do my best to respond to messages
Contact
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