Faber & Faber

Faber Editor and member of the Paperbacks team Sarah Savitt is, by her own admission, incredibly squeamish but that hasn't stopped her from selecting three books from Faber's Popular Medical Writing archive for her three choices.

Though I’m incredibly squeamish, one of my favourite genres of literature is popular medical writing. Perhaps because of its early connection with the Nursing Mirror (I'm speculating here!), Faber published quite a lot of highly acclaimed popular medical literature through the years. Here are three of the most interesting examples I found in the archive.

Migraine: Evolution of a Common Disorder by Oliver Sacks (the 1973 edition in the Archive is an abridged version of the original 1971 edition)

Oliver Sacks is one of my favourite writers and I was excited to discover that we published this, his first ever book. Though its general appeal isn’t as wide as his bestselling The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, this book still displays his trademark combination of precision, sympathy and intimacy, and it was reviewed at the time of publication by both the medical and literary press. The book covers the history (starting with the Greeks), causes, treatments and mysteries of migraines, drawing on case studies, medical literature and writers including Dickens, George Eliot and Freud.

Sacks writes that part of his interest in migraines stems from the fact that they ‘remind us, again and again, of the absolute continuity of mind and body’. And of course Sacks recently gave a wonderful quote for Frances Wilson’s The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, part of which explores Dorothy’s own migraines.

 

A Journey Round My Skull by Frigyes Karinthy, translated from the Hungarian by Vernon Duckworth Barker (1939)

This is a fascinating and terrifying memoir about having a brain tumour, written by a noted Hungarian novelist and playwright. Karinthy was diagnosed with the tumour after experiencing auditory hallucinations, which are wonderfully described, but the most notable scene is an electrifying account of having brain surgery from a patient’s perspective.

Despite the intensely frightening nature of his illness, his prose is calm, unsentimental and arresting, and he is always alert to how being ill affects one’s relationships with friends, family and colleagues.

The book was recently published in a New York Review of Books Classics edition with an introduction by Oliver Sacks, who calls it ‘a masterpiece’.

The Way of a Surgeon by George Sava (1949)

George Sava was a surgeon and also a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction (I don’t know when he slept - check out his Wikipedia page. In this book, Sava chronicles various advancements in surgical techniques and explores topics including anaesthesia, gender disorders, mental health and surgery, and when it’s better not to operate. It seems like Sava was the Atul Gawande of his day, trying to bring medical (particularly surgical) knowledge and ethics to a wider audience.

The book also reminded me of the recently published Direct Red by Gabriel Weston, an amazing and very moving memoir of being a female surgeon.