Product Description

Inside every hospital exists a world no outsider has been allowed to see, not even the young men and women who arrive there to begin careers in medicine. They think it's going to be like TV, and pretty soon they wish it was, because instead they're surrounded by death, disease and suffering and their only outlets are pitch-black humour and urgent, visceral sex. Into this world plunges an idealistic young doctor. But as one harrowing ordeal follows another his relationship becomes increasingly cynical with patients and colleagues and he finds escape in a purely physical relationship with a student nurse. Then something happens that shocks him into seeking redemption, but he can gain it only by challenging the most powerful institutions of medicine. Written by a former doctor, Bodies is a novel of almost unbearable power and intensity, an urgent despatch from the frontline of hospital life. It is also a moving portrait of the loss of innocence, the healing power of sexual love, and of a young man's quest for redemption in a world that long ago lost its sense of right or wrong.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #522042 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The unnamed narrator of Jed Mercurio's Bodiesis a newly qualified house officer in a busy city hospital. He arrives with his ideals intact and a vision of what his career in medicine will be. Within a short time the relentless procession of sick and damaged patients, the long, wearying hours he is obliged to work, the cynicism of his colleagues and the constant presence of death and disease take their toll. His idealism vanishes. He looks the other way when senior doctors are negligent or treat patients with contempt. He suffers guilt when a terrible mistake of his own is routinely covered up. His only escape is an intense sexual relationship with a student nurse. Sex is as clinically described in Bodiesas the indignities that age and accident inflict on the body. Mercurio wants to replace the melodrama of TV hospital series in which square-jawed doctors and glamorous nurses battle heroically against sickness and disease. In order to do so, he spares the reader few of the physical details that accompany illness and the body's disintegration. In pursuit of realism he peppers his text with medical slang and jargon, carefully annotated and explained in footnotes. What he has produced, however, is not realism but an inverted version of the melodrama. Instead of everything finally turning out well, the reader knows that, in this novel, everything will turn out very badly indeed. In place of square-jawed doctors saving the sick, Mercurio gives us drug-popping cynics exchanging the blackest of banter over dying patients. Melodrama it may be but, as the book's narrator seeks redemption by turning whistle-blower on hospital practices, it is very gripping melodrama.--Nick Rennison

From the Publisher
An incredibly powerful and disturbing novel about a junior hospital doctor. The first novel by the writer of Cardiac Arrest.

About the Author
Jed Mercurio trained at the University of Birmingham Medical School and worked at various hospitals in the West Midlands. He wrote the highly acclaimed television drama Cardiac Arrest (under the pseudonym of John Macure). Bodies is his first novel.

Customer Reviews

Brave New World?
With the current crop of television soap operas ranging from the bathetic Holby City to the hyperbolic E.R., there is nothing in the media that truly reflects the nature of hospital medicine, nothing to tell it like it really is.

Welcome then, Jed Mercurio, a former doctor himself, delivering his own sharp commentary of life as a junior doctor at an NHS Hospital. With tones that clearly resonate of Samuel Shek's House of God, Mercurio offers readers a home brand of punchy writing with no less muck and grime.

Mercurio's nameless narrator journeys through the hospital, its corridors filled with corruption and cynicism, in search of an ideal world where patients improve and doctors romance nurses. Instead he encounters unbridled mendacity, botched medical errors and suffers his own relationship problems with his 'civilian' girlfriend. As readers, we gain insight into the narrator's internal moral, and emotion turmoil and see how this is translated not just physically (his childhood eczema resurfacing) but also into his work environment.

This book attempts to counter the deification of the medical profession and highlights the human nature of doctors, and how sometimes, even they make mistakes too. In an era of 'Fitness to Practise' it is also refreshing to see the author highlight the oft under mentioned issue of whistle-blowing.

On the upside, this book is a thoroughly entertaining yet chillingly accurate portrayal of less than perfect hospital life. With its easily accessible style, it serves as a potential warning to all medical students as to what the 'real world' of medicine is truly like, guts and all.

The only possible downside? It's been commissioned for a BBC Television Series

An inside glimpse of hospital life
To cut a long story short, this is a rollicking good read. Get your hands on a copy and be prepared for a gritty, illuminating and, at times, disturbing exposé on hospital life as seen through the eyes of a young doctor just out of medical school. I ploughed my way through this in a matter of days, despite the fact that I initially wondered whether there was any point to the story. Believe me, there is.

While Bodies is fictional, it's written by a former doctor and one can't help wondering if this is his way of blowing the whistle on his former colleagues. It charts one man's heartbreaking realisation that being a doctor is not the dream vocation he imagined it would be. As his idealism slips into despair, the only thing that keeps him going is a somewhat sordid affair with a young, engaged-to-be-married nurse.

If you're about to go into hospital or know someone who is, you might not feel comfortable reading this book. But if you believe in "truth" or just like being submerged in damn good fiction, you would be hard pressed to find a more interesting, page-turning book

No more 'authentic' than any of the soaps
The scariest thing about this book is the final sentence on the back-cover blurb: "...(a) disturbingly authentic dispatch from the frontline of hospital life". Jed Mercurio has made a name for himself by tapping into the recognition that hospital soaps used to portray a one-sided, glamorous view of hospital life, and deliberately portraying the other side: medical blunders, cover-ups, callous doctors etc. This does not make his book 'authentic'. Rather, it is equally one-sided - he presents a view that is jaundiced, pessimistic and ulimately hopeless. Just as the soaps cram far more heroism into hospital life than really occurs, so he crams far more lethal negligence and cynicism than really occurs. For most of us in the NHS, the truth lies somewhere between: we have seen (and perhaps made) both disastrous blunders and strokes of life-saving genius, amidst long stretches of routine; we have felt both despair and pride. Dr Mercurio's book may be authentic for him, but I find it hard to imagine he is in a majority.

The medicine itself is not always authentic either. I don't know of any NHS hospital (and I've worked in a few) where the medical SHO prescribes for and extubates patients on ICU. And as for a patient waking up immediately after a twenty-minute cardiac arrest (due to 'massive MI') - well, it could be straight off Holby City. Like a previous reviewer, I found the footnotes excessive. Maybe a non-medical reader would find them valuable, but even he/she would probably have spotted something wrong with Dr Mercurio's definition of the 'mons vaginis'.

On the plus side, Dr Mercurio makes some trenchant points: traditional medical school training is not well-geared to the practicalities of being a junior doctor; and hospitals have not been good at detecting (let alone correcting) weaknesses in the system that allow errors to be made. In these and other matters he has caught something of the Zeitgeist of the current NHS, which gives his book a topical bite. He does also have an ear for a truly poetic turn of phrase (the 'lithium wind' will stick in my memory for some time), and his prose is generally engaging.

The book inevitably invites comparison with 'The House of God', and unfortunately fares badly: it is as if Dr Mercurio has deliberately set out to write an NHS equivalent, and has succeeded so well that it might as well be a clone. It's all there: the worldly-wise role model, the suicidal colleague, the consultant obsessed with post-mortems and dress code, the wisecracks, the desperate sex (which becomes quite tedious eventually), even the semi-redemptive ending. 'Bodies' offers nothing new over its American predecessor, but is equally readable.

In short, to any aspiring doctor, medical student or interested layman, I'd say: read it by all means, but don't take it too seriously.