Published October 28, 2009
Monday Books, Publisher
ISBN-10: 1906308128
ISBN-13: 978-1-906308-12-4
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Publisher’s summary:
Theodore Dalrymple has spent 20 years working as a prison and hospital doctor in one of Britain’s poorest inner cities – and chronicling his experiences in regular dispatches in some of Britain’s best-selling magazines.
Drug addicts and desperate drunks, battered wives and suicidal burglars, elderly Alzheimer’s sufferers and teenage stabbing victims… they all pass through his surgery, and he uses the experience of treating them to examine life for those unfortunate enough to live at the bottom end of society. He writes with a combination of dry humour, compassion and, occasionally, anger – mostly at the inhuman bureaucracy of the system, which works against the doctors and nurses as they try to help their patients.
Second Opinion – a series of short, sharp pieces compiled from Dalrymple’s regular and much-loved ‘Second Opinion’ and ‘If Symptoms Persist’ columns in The Spectator magazine – offers a compelling insight to what it’s really like to work at the sharp end of modern medicine.