Bedside Reading

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When I first really started thinking about medical humanities, torytelling and "accidental CPD", about 14 years ago, I set up the Chesterfield Medical Humanities Book Club, which is still running. The very first book that we talked about was Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, which I had read before when it first came out and which I went back to and loved all over again.

So when I started bedside reading, I really thought that someone very early on would say, we must talk about Cutting for Stone. And no one did. I didn't push anybody because I knew it had to be the right time. Obviously it's always the guest's choice of what people talk about when they come on this podcast and it was a great delight to get a message from Alice Deasy a few months ago to say, that she had read Cutting for Stone, that she couldn't stop thinking about it, that she couldn't stop talking about it, that she couldn't stop recommending it to people, and that maybe she could come and talk about it on the podcast. I have had a brilliant time rediscovering this novel and talking to Alice.

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Creativity and Wellbeing Week runs from 18th - 24th May 2026. So this week I am bringing you an episode which is all about creativity in health, basing our conversation on the phenomenal book, Art Cure by Daisy Fancourt. If you haven't come across this book, it is absolutely brilliant.  Daisy has managed to distill into a few hundred pages a giant but incredibly accessible meta-analysis of all of the evidence around creative health andthe arts for health, thinking not only about wellbeing, but also about mental and physical health and the tangible benefits which we and our patients can gain from involvement in the arts and creativity.

Who better to talk about this book with than the very wonderful Nicola Davis, who has been on the podcast before and who some of you may know from her work with the organisation Creative Clinic?
Find the organisation Creative Clinic here: https://www.creativeclinic.org/ and their facebook feed https://www.facebook.com/crxeate and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/_creativeclinic/

We mentioned the NCCH GP Special Interest Group, find them here: https://ncch.org.uk/gp-sig-for-creative-health

Daisy Fancourt's profile and contact information https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/44526-daisy-fancourt

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Kim Scott's Radical Candor had been on my to-read pile for years. I have no idea what it was that was stopping me picking it up. So I was delighted to be given the nudge by the very wise Michael Killshaw to pick it up.  I was not disappointed. it is such an accessible and brilliant book, relevant to anybody who works with people in a team, but particularly if you lead a team, particularly if you are a trainer or an educator of some sort, there is so much practical wisdom and a framework which really, truly has changed my life.

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A warm welcome back today to Greater Manchester GP, Zalan Alam. Today we are talking about Shattered Lands by Sam Dalrymple, which is an incredibly readable and very accessible, though enormous book about the five partitions of British India.

It is something that  really captivated me. There are so many brilliant human interest stories and it's really made me understand some parts of history much, much better than I ever did before. It's undoubtedly given me  a lot of food for thought. So it's a really, really good nonfiction book, which I would thoroughly, thoroughly recommend and from which there is undoubtedly some accidental CPD.

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A really warm welcome to neurodevelopmental forensic psychiatrist Claudia Camden-Smith today, where we're talking about Patric Gagne's memoir, Sociopath.

This is such an interesting book, which really gripped me, made me think an awful lot, challenged a lot of my thinking, and it's something I've thought a lot about since I finished it. So it has been a real joy  to be talking to Claudia today about the book and about some of her own professional reflections around psychopathy. Particularly how prevalent psychopaths.  we talk about not reconising female psychopaths of whom the author Patric Gagne obviously is one.It's been a really really interesting conversation and it's an absolutely great book for accidental CPD.