Also Human: The Inner Lives of Doctors

Caroline Elton

Mar 2018 · Cornerstone Digital · Narrated by Rachel Bavidge

About this audiobook

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Also Human by Caroline Elton, read by Rachel Bavidge.

Doctors are the people we turn to when we fall ill. They are the people we trust with our lives, and with the lives of those we love. Yet who can doctors turn to at moments of stress, or when their own working lives break down?

What does it take to confront death, disease, distress and suffering every day? To work in a healthcare system that is stretched to breaking point? To carry the responsibility of making decisions that can irrevocably change someone’s life – or possibly end it? And how do doctors cope with their own questions and fears, when they are expected to have all the answers?

Caroline Elton is a psychologist who specialises in helping doctors. For over twenty years she has listened as doctors have unburdened themselves of the pressures of their jobs: the obstetrician whose own fertility treatment failed; the trainee oncologist who found herself unable to treat patients suffering from the disease that killed her father; the brilliant neurosurgeon struggling to progress her career in an environment that was hostile to women. Drawing on extraordinary case studies and decades of work supporting clinicians, Also Human presents a provocative, perceptive and deeply humane examination of the modern medical profession.

'Crucial and timely.' Atul Gawande

'Haunting, beautiful and urgent.' Johann Hari

Ratings and reviews

Superb

About the author

Caroline Elton is an occupational psychologist who has spent the last twenty years training and supporting doctors. She received her PhD from University College London's School of Medicine and set up and led the Careers Unit supporting doctors in over seventy hospitals across London.