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Kate Womersley

Compassion fatigue is as damaging to a doctor’s health as to a patient’s

Kate Womersley 28 September 2019 9:00 am

Medical training is a process of toughening up: take iron that’s vulnerable to rust, add carbon and make steel. That’s…

Popular medical non-fiction will soon have covered every human body part

Kate Womersley 17 August 2019 9:00 am

Nobody warns you when you start medical school that your career decisions have only just begun. Up to a decade…

Can anyone get away with murder anymore?

Kate Womersley 6 April 2019 9:00 am

When the 24-year-old Angela Gallop started working at the Home Office forensic science service, her boss lost no time in…

Discover your inner wolf: love your family, value your home, respect your elders, be altruistic, and have fun, says Elli Radinger

Discover your inner wolf and lead a better life

Kate Womersley 23 February 2019 9:00 am

When it comes to showing emotion, are animals like humans or humans like animals? The difference is subtle but significant, says Kate Womersley

Illustration depicting the circulation of the blood

It’s entirely possible to die of a broken heart

Kate Womersley 27 October 2018 9:00 am

The numbers invite awe: three billion beats in a lifetime; 100,000 miles of vessels. But on the hospital floor, wonder…

The burden of freedom: Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan, reviewed

Kate Womersley 15 September 2018 9:00 am

It’s 1830, and among the sugar cane of Faith Plantation in Barbados, suicide seems like the only way out. Decapitations…

Unlucky in love: Caroline’s Bikini, by Kirsty Gunn, reviewed

Kate Womersley 18 August 2018 9:00 am

‘The most interesting novels are a bit strange,’ Kirsty Gunn once told readers of the London Review of Books. ‘They…

Why I now find listening to Beethoven nauseating

Kate Womersley 10 March 2018 9:00 am

Stephen Bernard has led an institutionalised life. Behind the doors of the church presbytery, at public school, on hospital wards…

The surgeon and anatomist David Hayes Agnew, teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1880s. The cautious Americans were initially resistant to Lister, who toured the US hoping to convert the sceptics

How Joseph Lister transformed surgery from butchery to a healing art

Kate Womersley 13 January 2018 9:00 am

Every operation starts the same way. Chlorhexidine scrubbed under nails, lathered over wet hands, palm-to-palm, fingers interlaced, thumbs, wrists, forearms.…

Read Nicola Barker’s H(A)PPY to the guitar music of Agustin Barrios

Kate Womersley 5 August 2017 9:00 am

It is an unexpected pleasure when fiction has a soundtrack to accompany the work of reviewing. H(A)PPY is ‘best enjoyed…

The chick and the dead: Clare Holman plays the pathologist Dr Laura Hobson in Inspector Morse. Rex images.

The perfect place to fall in love? The mortuary

Kate Womersley 22 April 2017 9:00 am

I grew up with a skeleton in the attic. My mother’s clinical training bestowed on our family a short man’s…

How to improve bedside manners

Kate Womersley 18 February 2017 9:00 am

‘A tricky part of my job,’ the GP said, scrolling through the next patient’s notes, ‘is breaking good news.’ As…

Siri Hustvedt’s thoughts on art, science and the human condition

Kate Womersley 21 January 2017 9:00 am

This past autumn has felt more uncomfortable than usual to be a woman looking at men looking at women. From…

Conceptual image of Lactobacillus acidolphus that occurs naturally in the gastrointestinal tract and mouth

Want to feel better? Be kind to your bugs

Kate Womersley 27 August 2016 9:00 am

There are more bacteria in your gut than there are stars in our galaxy. Ed Yong’s book explaining their possibilities is as wondrous as a sacred text, says Kate Womersley

Tommy Wieringa’s Job-like hero has an age-old problem

Kate Womersley 20 August 2016 9:00 am

With a title like A Beautiful Young Wife, this is of course about the decline of an older husband. Professor…

The lymphatic system of the human head, from a medical textbook of 1883

The enduring mystery of the human body

Kate Womersley 23 July 2016 9:00 am

It’s not unreasonable to expect that the anatomy syllabus for a medical degree should include breasts. Last year I performed…

The race from the Big C to the Big D

Kate Womersley 30 April 2016 9:00 am

The ‘journey’ — at least the one played out in public — begins with an announcement that you are incurable.…

A deadly role reversal

Kate Womersley 6 February 2016 9:00 am

Who would you trust to take a blade to your brain? Medical schools and hospitals, arbiters of this outrageous intimacy,…

Oliver Sacks bids farewell in style

Kate Womersley 12 December 2015 9:00 am

‘I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not…

The kindness of strangers is a pleasing mystery

Kate Womersley 17 October 2015 8:00 am

When I applied to medical school, an experienced doctor offered me some advice: ‘Don’t give them reason to think you’re…

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We could certainly do with a Tacitus now

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Cartoons

‘So much for the parties’ tree-planting pledge.’
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