Gabriel Weston is an extraordinary writer. An ENT surgeon who now prefers to carry out excisions of skin cancers, she has found a niche in exploring moral dilemmas in medicine. Her first book, Direct Red (2009), examined such clashes as a patient’s need for empathy and a surgeon’s requirement to be steely. A serious problem at the time was how the punishing schedules of junior doctors made it virtually impossible for them to give patients the attention and compassion they so often needed.
Weston’s second book, Dirty Work (2013), was a novel – and no less ethically probing. Nancy, its female gynaecologist protagonist, takes on her department’s unpopular abortion lists, telling herself she is performing an essential feminist service. The reader soon becomes aware of how complex the issue is. I knew this well myself, having had to anaesthetise a very young woman under-going her seventh abortion. As someone who longed for babies, I felt sick, and subsequently gave up my gynaecology list. In the novel, Nancy freezes one day in surgery when the mother bleeds, and finds herself charged with professional misconduct. Both books deal in a thrilling, nuanced, illuminating way with medical ethical dilemmas.
Now Weston turns to the wonder of the human body. Alive is a guide to our organs: their anatomy, and how and why they function. It is interspersed with details of Weston’s life – her personal experience of illness; and how, as an English literature graduate, she came to study medicine. (One day she found refuge from an unhappy relationship in the peace of her GP’s consulting room.
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