The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Confessions of a medical wild card
Novelist Joanna Cannon’s superb memoir traces her path from school dropout to doctor. By Christie Watson
176pp, Wellcome Collection, £12.99, ebook £5.69 as a wild card: a mature student. She had left school at 15 with one O-level and bounced between jobs – delivering pizza, pulling pints, working at an animal rescue centre, spraying fragrance in a department store and “watching people run away”. In her early years at medical school, she felt like a fraud and worried that she wouldn’t make a good doctor. But she became passionate about bodies, and was soon “a regular at the mortuary”, while also thinking about souls – even as she was deep in dissection. “As the brain was lifted out and passed to me, I realised that I held in my hands the very essence of who this person was. Their thoughts, hopes, dreams, worries. Their personality. Their sense of self. A lifetime of memories.”
Cannon describes the giddy excitement of her first experiences with “real patients”. She also discusses her experiences on the other side, as a patient who suffered a serious car accident, which taught her the “dangers of kindness”: “kind words, like all the other words that come out of your mouth (and your keyboard) need care and placement.” She does not focus long on the accident, however; it was her work as a doctor that both broke and mended her.
We are given a glimpse of the enormous pressure of A&E, where Cannon would work for 12 hours without eating or drinking, and the pressure only builds. One night she cared for a dying patient without any help from her senior, who had gone to Amsterdam halfway through a shift. She spent an hour listening to the cries of pain of the patient, who had received the maximum dose of medication, feeling there was “nothing I could do to help her”.
With this lack of support – and this bullying – Cannon’s burnout was almost inevitable, but psychiatry rescued her. Her relief when she was encouraged to talk to the patients – rather than being told that she talked too much – was unimaginable. “If medicine is a book of stories, psychiatry holds the wisest chapters and the ones from which you will learn the most,” she writes.
Cannon learns that “returning a life to someone very often has nothing to do with restoring a heartbeat,” and this line is perhaps the heartbeat of the book. Cannon’s narrative skill here is subtle yet tremendous. She tells us this at the start of the book, so we know what is to come, yet she unfolds the process of her revelation slowly: instead of rushing through the hospital, we walk with her, feeling the weight of her steps in our own, the enormity of the responsibilities all doctors must bear.
Breaking and Mending represents an interesting link between several other recent medical memoirs. In War Doctor, published earlier this year, the surgeon David Nott tells us that he is not afraid of death, but of not living a full life. Paul Kalanithi, in
BREAKING AND MENDING
When Breath Becomes Air (2016), echoes this idea: “As a resident, my highest ideal was not saving lives – everyone dies eventually – but guiding a patient or family to an understanding of death or illness.”
Cannon’s book gives us that understanding. Her writing is nuanced: the nurses, for example, have a solid presence, and there is an appreciation for all the disciplines, a recognition that healthcare is a team game with many equally important (but all too often voiceless) players. There is no bombastic ego here; instead we have poetry and lyrical prose, an ode to dignity and choice, to living well with the time we have. Since 2014, graduate doctors in Scotland have been given a poetry book, Tools of the Trade, to “help navigate the stress of their vocation”. Narrative non-fiction such as Cannon’s offers more than stress relief: it has as much to teach new doctors as anatomy and physiology and pharmacology textbooks. Perhaps even more.
Only occasionally does the book veer into politics. Although Cannon’s points – that NHS clinics
“We were separated! We are reunited! We will be one for eternity.” This handcoloured postcard is one of the exhibits in a meaty collection of essays, edited by Maude BassKrueger and Sophie Kurkdjian, the first comprehensive history of French fashion in the First World War.
Postcards such as this one were known as fantaisies patriotiques and were churned out – some in print runs as large as 100,000 – for women to send to men on the Front. The vision they presented was of home unchanging, modest women in pretty pastels, barely flashing a hint of ankle. Yet when the soldiers returned, it was to a transformed sartorial scene. By 1918, smart women’s wardrobes were full of jersey, the new wonder material, first sold as “djersette”; suits in the narrow, masculine “barrel” silhouette, which used less fabric and heralded the postwar “garçonne” style; or overalls, left over from women’s war work, which made their mark on couture in the form of a craze for pockets. Yale, £50