Life and death in a modern hospital, from Seamus O'Mahony, an
award-winning author and physician at Cork University Hospital
Seamus O'Mahony charts the realities of work in the 'ministry of
bodies', that huge complex where people come to be cured and to die.
From unexpected deaths to moral quandaries and bureaucratic disasters,
O'Mahony documents life in the halls and wards that all of us will visit
at some point in our lives with his characteristic wit and dry and
unsentimental intelligence.
Absurd general emails, vain and self-promoting specialists, the
relentless parade of self-destructive drinkers and drug users, the
comical expectations of baffled patients: this is not a conventional
medical memoir, but the collective biography of one of our great modern
institutions - the general hospital - through the eyes of a brilliant
writer, who happens to be a doctor.