BOOKS
"Though he calls his ambitious work ‘merely a snapshot’, his modesty belies the collection’s impressive range of surveyed authors… Will entertain literary scholars and medical students alike." - Publishers Weekly
Psychopath?
Why We Are Charmed by the Anti-hero
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Mercier Press (ISBN-978-1-78117-590-3)
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Ever wondered why your spine tingles when Hannibal Lecter escapes from custody? Or why a narcissistic, womanising assassin for Her Majesty’s Secret Service is revered worldwide as a fictional hero? Or why you feel a thrill when Frank Underwood manipulates a naïve senator? Or why you root for Tom Ripley to avoid the clutches of the Italian police?
Psychopath? takes you on a journey through the world of fictional villains and anti-heroes – the lying, the cheating and the murder. But are they psychopaths in the true sense? Guided by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, this book examines whether a psychologist might come to that conclusion. More importantly, it asks why you long for the anti-hero to succeed. How, with each nefarious deed, your sympathy and loyalty are garnered, pulling you in deeper with every scene or turn of the page until finally, irresistibly, you find yourself utterly charmed by the psychopath.
Fiction & Physicians
Medicine through the Eyes of Writers
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The Liffey Press (ISBN-978-1-90830826-9)
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John Keats, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, François Rabelais, William Somerset Maugham. All were writers of fiction but, more surprisingly, all were also medical doctors. Anton Chekhov, A.J. Cronin, Oliver St John Gogarty, Michael Crichton . . . even Nostradamus.
The world has seen literally dozens of them – famous writers who wielded a stethoscope as skillfully as they did a pen. So, what do literature and medicine have in common? Is there something about the singular experience of being a doctor that results in a compelling desire for communication, or indeed catharsis?
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Meanwhile, we have seen many non-medical writers who have made fictional physicians their principal protagonists, heroes and villains alike, so compellingly vivid they keep the pages turning. Dr Jekyll, Doctor Zhivago, Doc Daneeka, Dick Diver. And of course there are numerous examples of writers who have deftly described fictional patients struck down by illness in the key twist of a plot. Ian McEwan, Albert Camus, Sebastian Faulks, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Thomas Mann.
This is an exploration of the links between literature and medicine. With hundreds of examples, Fiction and Physicians provides an entertaining and absorbing look at how the world of medicine has inspired centuries of Irish, European and American literature.