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A medical humanities podcast where we explore themes from fiction, memoir and other non traditional non-textbooks which help to make us better at what we do.
Hosted by Dr Tara George, a GP and medical educator, in each episode a different guest explores a book that has changed their practice. Follow us on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/bedsidereading.bsky.social Facebook or Instagram @bedsidereadingpodcast. If you'd like to recommend a book or to come on the podcast as a guest please email: bedsidereadingpodcast@gmail.com. Episodes hosted by Tara George, edited by Levi Gee
209 Episodes
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Send us a text I'm delighted to welcome Professor Paul Crawford to the podcast today. We are talking about his novel, The Wonders of Dr Bent, described in the publisher's blurb as "a twisted tale of murder, revenge and abandonment." It is sort of a crime thriller, but there's so much more to this novel. There are some beautiful characters. There are two main protagonists who skirt on the edges of health and and illness. We see characters who are thriving professionally whilst battling...
Send us a text A warm welcome back today to GP Kirsty Shires, who's here today to talk with me about Jacqueline Harpman's 1995 novel, I Who Have Never Known Men. This is an absolutely astonishing book. It is dystopian fiction at its best, I think. It is human, it is connected, it is thought-provoking, it is bizarre. There's so much to think about packed into 200 very short pages. I've thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It's definitely a book I'm going to go back to, and I've really en...
Send us a text Educated by Tara Westover is one of those books which has really stayed with me since I first read it back in 2018. It's also a book that I just assumed when I started this podcast that somebody would approach me and want to talk about. It feels astonishing that we've got as far as season 11 before anybody has asked to come on and discuss it. I'm glad I waited, though, because I've thoroughly loved my conversation with Syba Sunny today about the book and about some of the them...
Send us a text Welcome to November 2025 and season 11 of the podcast,. We are celebrating our 4th Birthday in November and my guest today, Claire Le Day aka GP Steph celebrates her 40th birthday in November. Claire/Steph is here to talk about her fabulous med school diaries which have been published as Fear and Loathing in Plymouth. If you are looking for a book to make you think, to take you on a trip back down memory lane, to remember what it was like to be a teenager, to cringe alon...
Send us a text It is a huge pleasure today to welcome doctor and writer, Majid Parsa. We're talking about The Ayatollah's Gaze: a memoir of the forbidden and the fabulous, which is his first boook. What a book and what a memoir it is. I absolutely loved it. I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I picked it up. It has a phenomenal pink cover. It is wise. It is insightful. It is moving. It is very, very funny in places and it was a real window into a world which I might not otherwise ev...
Send us a text It's a real treat today to welcome one of the authors of Ultra Women, Emma Wilkinson to the podcast. Ultra Women, written by Emma Wilkinson and Lily Canter, is a book which rather defies classification. It is a book about women doing extraordinary things in the fields of endurance sport, but it's very much not a "sports book". We've got wonderful stories. We've got sociology. We've got history. We've got physiology. We've got a good dose of "invisible women" in there as well....
Send us a text Suzanne O'Sullivan's The Age of Diagnosis was hotly awaited and has received a lot of discussion on social media and in the national press. Ben Tyler and I had both really enjoyed her former books and looked forward to this book. Overdiagnosis is a bit of a hot topic lately, but as I hope we manage to explore, keeping curiosity and compassion at the forefront of what we do are much more important than making hard judgements. We mention John Harris' brilliant subst...
Send us a text John Harris' excellent book Maybe I'm Amazed has been one of my non-fiction top reads this year. It was a huge pleasure to welcome James Booth to the podcast to discuss it, and share some of our experiences. We are both GPs, we are both parents of autistic young people and we both found John's book relatable, funny, warm, moving and necessary. If you want to know more about the book, here's what the publisher's say: "In this extraordinary memoir, a father tells the s...
Send us a text A warm welcome today to Dr. Ahmed Handy, who is here to talk about his memoir, Quacks. We've recorded today my favourite bookshop, which is Scarthin Books in Cromford, near Matlock. If the sound is a little bit different to how you might expect the podcast to sound, I hope you'll bear with us. There were a few people in the background. There were loads of people looking at books, thinking about books, and drinking cups of tea and eating cake in this absolute gem of a place. I...
Send us a text Medication, Mental Illness and Murder. What Really Killed the Crespi Twins? sounds like the title of a true crime book or a thriller. I suppose you could call this a true crime. This is an incredibly good book, which has really, really challenged me. I'm delighted to be welcoming Ed Jones, the author to the podcast today. It's quite a hard read in places. It's a story about father who was significantly unwell, who was struggling with side effects from medication and who took...
Send us a text It's a huge pleasure today to welcome Martin Brunet to Bedside Reading. We are talking about his fabulous book, Your Worry Makes Sense. You may have discovered Martin on Instagram where he's a bit of a mental health sensation. He is such a wonderful communicator and an incredible translator of knowledge. And this comes across absolutely brilliantly in this fantastic book, which has already been recommended to a huge number of my patients and my colleagues with very good effect...
Send us a text Brotherless Night by VV Ganeshanathan, which won the Women's Prize last year, was my absolute top read of 2024. It's been a real joy to revisit it today with Kathleen Weneden to think about the wonders of the storytelling and the importance of hearing stories from the perspective of people who often do not have their own narratives captured, Some of the themes in Brotherless Night, have really, really stayed with me. This is an absolutely phenomenal novel. I cannot recommend ...
Send us a text I'm delighted to welcome Jo Rose to the podcast to talk about The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clark. This is an incredibly moving book which I was delighted to see won the 2025 Women's Prize for non-fiction. It interweaves the stories of two children, Kiera and who has died after a road traffic accident, and Max, who has cardiomyopathy, severe heart failure, and is awaiting a heart transplant. This is the story of how Kiera's heart becomes Max's heart, along with an incr...
Send us a text I've got two guests with me today, Joanna Bircher and Ben Allen, two GPs who are talking about a book they've both been involved in. Joanna is one of the co-editors of a collection of stories from leaders in Primary Care. The stories featured are not just from GPs, there's a really, really wide range of primary care professionals talking about leadership and what leadership means for them in a really practical sense of how they have done the things that they've done. It ...
Send us a text A warm welcome back to the podcast today to novelist Rebecca Wait. We are today talking about her fabulous novel Havoc, which was published in July 2025. We recorded it just before it was released into the world. As this episode goes out it's been flying off the shelves for a few weeks now. It is an excellent, excellent book. If you are looking for something to pack and take on holiday with you, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is the absolutely compelling and co...
Send us a text Today I am delighted to be talking to Heidi Edmondson, consultant in emergency medicine from London. We are talking about her second book, her memoir Bellyfull. This is the story of Heidi's own journey through a very serious and rare illness and her strategies for denial, for adaptation, and for keeping on, keeping on, really beyond the point at which most of us would perhaps have succumbed to the overwhelming fatigue and general malaise that she was suffering from. She expl...
Send us a text Have you ever suffered from imposter syndrome? I think most healthcare professionals have done at some point during their lives. Today's book is one which seeks to address many of the factors that influence that. Though interestingly, the writer Tara Mohr doesn't ever use the phrase "imposter syndrome". I'm here today with Sam Powell to talk about Playing Big by Tara Mohr. This is a really accessible leadership book, thinking about why women often "play small", why they don't n...
Send us a text Regular listeners may remember that I always say that I don't like fantasy and also how excited that I get when I am able to talk to an author. So I'm delighted today to welcome Joe Moore to Bedside Reading to talk about his young adult novel, which is called Blue Suns and Skyshine. It's quite a difficult book to categorise. And I think we've decided that it's magic realism, though Joe's decided that he'd quite like to invent a completely new genre, which is called magical re...
Send us a text It's a huge pleasure to welcome the brilliant Becky Platt to Bedside Reading this week. We're talking about Needle by Patrice Lawrence. Becky is an ACP in paediatric emergency medicine in London. She's also part of the exec for Don't Forget the Bubbles, an amazing open access medical education organisation. https://dontforgetthebubbles.com/ Becky's compassion, her willingness to see young people as themselves, to be thinking about things from other people's perspective...
Send us a text A very warm welcome today to retired paediatrician, Dr Harry Stone, who is here today to talk about his memoir, Trust Me, I'm Exhausted, How Not to Train a Doctor. This is a really engaging medical memoir, one framed by an admission as a patient to the hospital that retired Dr Stone worked in. As he lies in a hospital bed, before he lies in a hospital bed, as he lies on a trolley, as he experiences some of the most challenging care that the NHS is able to offer in corridors, ...
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