MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Here’s the story, Doc
JONATHAN TAYLOR is moved by the plea to replace mechanistic medicine with a ‘narrative’ approach based on imagination and humanity
BEST OF BOTH WORLDS: Cardiologist Juan Manuel Romero at a hospital in Ciudad Obregon in Sonora, Mexico, takes part in pre-op consultation with a patient and her doctor 400 miles away in La Paz, Baja California. Telemedicine does help deliver care to patients in rural and remote locations across Mexico.
[Intel Free Press/CC] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
Oliver Sacks, Letters,
ed. Kate Edgar, Picador, £30
THROUGHOUT his life, the great neurologist Oliver Sacks emphasised the human aspect of medical practice.
Often faced with the most debilitating and apparently dehumanising conditions, Sacks demanded that doctors stopped seeing their patients as “bodies” and instead met them as “human beings”: “We must come down from our position as ‘objective observers’,” he wrote in his famous work Awakenings (1973), “and meet our patients face-to-face; we must meet them in a sympathetic and imaginative encounter.”
This ideal of medical practice runs as a kind of refrain, or perhaps on-going quest, throughout Sacks’s fascinating Selected Letters, brilliantly edited and contextualised by Kate Edgar. Over and over, he rails against the dominant mechanical models of diagnosis, seeking to replace them with something more human.
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JOHN GREEN explores the argument that psychiatry needs to move away from the idea of just seeing and treating the individual
JONATHAN TAYLOR is entranced by a collection that touches themes of homelessness, loneliness and abuse with dream-like imagery
From Argentina, a novel by Federico Falco and a collection of chronicles by Hebe Uhart; and poetry by Belarusian-Argentinean Natalia Litvinova, and Chilean Vicente Huidobro