'Stylish and exhilarating... from a wide-ranging mind and a profound humanity... inspiring' Hilary Mantel
'A wonderful series of meditations - clinical, anthropological, literary and deeply humane - on his patients and their illnesses.' Henry Marsh
Timely, thought-provoking and eloquent, brimming both with warmth and insight, he puts himself among the ranks of ... Oliver Sacks and Atul Gawande.' The Times
Unreliable bodies and shifting symptoms are all in a day's work for a GP.
In his years of practising, Gavin Francis has seen it all: the promising law student trapped under the spell of anorexia; the bodybuilder whose use of illegal steroids threatens his fertility; the teenager agonising over the perplexing physical dramas of puberty; and the surprisingly upbeat woman growing a horn in the centre of her forehead.
In Shapeshifters he draws on his patients' bodily transformations, both welcome and unwelcome, bringing together case histories and accounts from the history of medicine, art, literature, myth and magic to show how the very essence of being human is change.
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eBook - ePub
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Information
Topic
MedicineTable of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- A note on confidentiality
- 1. Transformation
- 2. Werewolves: Agitation at the Full Moon
- 3. Conception: The First and Second Reason for Existing
- 4. Sleep: The Chamber of Dreams
- 5. Bodybuilding: Unhelmed by Fury
- 6. Scalp: Of Horns, Terror and Glory
- 7. Birth: Reshaping the Heart
- 8. Rejuvenation: An Alchemy of Youth and Beauty
- 9. Tattooing: The Art of Transformation
- 10. Anorexia: The Enchantment of Control
- 11. Hallucination: A Sphere of Devils
- 12. Puberty: Suddenly Accelerated Youth
- 13. Pregnancy: The Most Meticulous Work
- 14. Gigantism: Two Giants of Turin
- 15. Gender: The Two Lives of Tiresias
- 16. Jetlag: The Brain that Holds the Sky
- 17. Bonesetting: An Algebra of Healing
- 18. Menopause: Third Face of the Goddess
- 19. Castration: Hope, Love and Sacrifice
- 20. Laughter: Some Eminency in Ourselves
- 21. Prosthetics: Humanity 2.0
- 22. Memory: Palaces of Forgetting
- 23. Death: The Celebration of Life
- 24. Transformations
- Gratitude
- Notes on Sources
- List of Illustrations
- Index
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Yes, you can access Shapeshifters by Gavin Francis in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Medicine & Medical Theory, Practice & Reference. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.