Shapeshifters: On Medicine & Human Change: A Doctor’s Notes on Medicine & Human Change (Wellcome Collection) - Hardcover

Gavin Francis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1781257736 ISBN 13: 9781781257739

Publisher: Wellcome Collection, 2018

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Gavin Francis has worked across four continents as a surgeon, emergency physician, medical officer with the British Antarctic Survey and latterly as a GP. He's the author of the Sunday Times bestseller Adventures in Human Being, which was a BMA Book of the Year, and Shapeshifters. His books have won the SMIT Scottish Book of the Year Award, the Saltire Award for Non-Fiction and been shortlisted for the Ondaatje and Costa Prizes. He also writes for the Guardian, The Times, the London Review of Books and Granta. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife and children.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wellcome Collection
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1781257736
• ISBN 13: 9781781257739
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304