Bedside Reading
Bedside Reading Podcast
A medical humanities podcast for bibliophile health care professionals where we explore themes from fiction, memoir and other non traditional non-textbooks which help to make us better at what we do. Hosted by Dr Tara George, a GP and medical educator in each episode a different guest explores a book that has changed their practice. Follow us on Twitter @bedsidepodcast or instagram @bedsidereadingpodcast. If you'd like to recommend a book or to come on the podcast as a guest please email: [email protected]. Episodes hosted by Tara George, edited by Levi Gee
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Top 10 Bedside Reading Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Bedside Reading episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Bedside Reading for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Bedside Reading episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
04/08/25 • 20 min
Trailer and welcome to bedside reading
Bedside Reading
11/14/21 • 0 min
welcome to bedside reading, I can't wait to start sharing books and ideas with you, the podcast goes live on Tuesday 16th November, here's a tiny taster to whet your appetite
Twixtmas Special 2024
Bedside Reading
12/31/24 • 26 min
I've got a collaborative Twixtmas special coming up today. I've asked a number of friends of the podcast to tell us about their top read of 2024 and what they're most looking forward to reading in 2025. Thanks for joining me in 2024, and I'm looking forward to sharing plenty more books with you in 2025.
Featured today are the voices and choices of:
Sabina Dosani https://sabinadosani.com/
Leah Hazard https://www.leahhazard.co.uk/
Derek Ochiai https://twitter.com/DrDerekOchiai
Helen Blomfield https://www.helenblomfield.co.uk/
Pim Dhahan https://www.linkedin.com/in/pim-dhahan-1a21a5b9/
Nicola Ennis https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicola-ennis-3b5ab1215/
Claire McKie https://www.linkedin.com/in/claire-mckie-a54a52234/
Nicola Davis https://bsky.app/profile/drnicoladavis.bsky.social and https://bsky.app/profile/crxeate.bsky.social
Anna Baverstock https://bsky.app/profile/annabav.bsky.social
David Hindmarsh https://www.youtube.com/c/GPTemplates
Kate Wharton https://www.instagram.com/katewharton27/?hl=en
Dani Hall https://x.com/danihalltweets and https://dontforgetthebubbles.com/
The books we recommended are:
Brotherless Night by VV Ganeshananthan
Song of the Whole Wide World by Tamarin Norwood
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
In Memoriam by Alice Wynn
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Wednesday's Child by Yiyun Li
The Trees by Percival Everett
Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris
Divided by Annabel Sowemimo
How to Save Babylon by Safiya Sinclair
Unheard by Rageshri Dhairyawan
Feel Good Productivity by Ali Abdal
You be Mother by Meg Mason
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
The books we are looking forward to are:
Heartstopper 6 by Alice Oseman
Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Book of Dust Trilogy by Philip Pullman
The Hallmarked Man by Robert Galbraith
Tell me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
The 5th book in Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club Series
The Elements of Marie Curie by Dava Sobel
Poems as Friends by Fiona Bennett
Kokoro by Beth Kempton
Microskills by Adaira Landry and Reesa E Lewiss
Your Worry Makes Sense Martin Brunet
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi
Leadership Special Episode
Bedside Reading
04/30/24 • 38 min
Today is a special episode of the podcast where I'm welcoming friends, leaders from all sorts of branches of healthcare to share a book that means something to them about leadership.
We would like to dedicate this episode to the memory of Dr Jenny Vaughan who died recently. She was perhaps best known for her campaigning work with Doctors Association UK, https://www.dauk.org/ leading the learn not blame campaign and championing the concept of just culture as well as for campaigning on behalf of Mr David Sellu and Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garber. In this she was the embodiment of authentic allyship and anti-racist leadership and a role model for us all.
Some of the book choices in this episode might well be on a leadership course reading list, some probably aren't. All of them should be though I suppose it depends who's writing the list and what they mean by leadership! I hope here we have a diversity of thought and a number of reflections on the different facets of leadership on what they mean to these wonderful people who are leaders in their own fields.
We have some classic children's fiction: The Jungle Book and Alice in Wonderland. We have a military leadership manual. We have books about psychology, about self-help, we have short stories and all sorts of others. A huge thank you to everyone who's been involved in making this episode and I hope that after you've listened you really will be in a position to take your leadership to the next level.
Partha Kar recommends The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
https://twitter.com/parthaskar
Anna Baverstock recommends Dare to Lead by Brene Brown
https://twitter.com/anna_annabav
Erin Carn-Bennett recommends Think Again by Adam Grant
https://twitter.com/erincarnbennett
Caroline Walker aka The Joyful Doctor recommends the Jeeves and Wooster series by PG Wodehouse
https://twitter.com/joyful_doctor
Evie Mensah recommends Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine by Uche Blackstock
https://twitter.com/eveosh
Helen Blomfield recommends Reinventing Organisations by Frederic Laloux
https://twitter.com/helenblomfield8
Nicola Fisher recommends Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
https://twitter.com/NicolaFisherRN
Dave Hindmarsh recommends Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet
https://twitter.com/GP_Templates
Margaret Ikpoh recommends Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey
https://twitter.com/docmagsy
Claire McKie recommends The Promise that Changes Everything by Nancy Kline
https://twitter.com/claire_mckie_
The Song of the Whole Wide World
Bedside Reading
10/15/24 • 34 min
Trigger warning: baby loss
This episode is especially for baby loss awareness week. Tamarin Norwood's incredible book about her son Gabriel
In the Lancet:
Wakley Prize Essay in the Lancet (2021)
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02690-8/fulltext
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02797-5/fulltext
About the book online:
If you want to buy the book: https://theindigopress.com/product/the-song-of-the-whole-wide-world/)
(or on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Song-Whole-Wide-World-gut-wrenching/dp/191164873X)
Essay in the Sunday Times: https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/health-fitness/article/how-losing-my-baby-changed-my-idea-of-motherhood-r8jvdlcjb
Essay in the Independent: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/baby-loss-ronaldo-child-grief-b2060596.html
Reviews of the book in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/28/grieve-child-book-tamarin-norwood-memoir-pregnancy-death
and T&F journal Life Writing: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14484528.2024.2384755
The book and other writing-related work in healthcare:
- THE SONG OF THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD been added to medical and midwifery curricula in the UK (Cambridge University and Warwick Med School) and in Australia (Newcastle School of Nursing and Midwifery), and is now gifted to bereaved families by one baby loss charity (Held In Our Hearts) and was a World Book Day recommendation by Sands, the UK's principal baby loss charity. It is the subject of two case studies exploring the role of literature in compassionate healthcare training, to be presented at the upcoming NHS NES Conference.
- 'FROM THE HEART' NOTELETS are packs of note cards with memory and writing prompts for parents whose baby has sadly died. These were created by Tamarin Norwood and Scottish baby loss charity Held In Our Hearts with HEIC funding, and are now provided for bereaved parents across 5 NHS Boards in Scotland as part of their baby loss support, and are increasingly being taken up by hospitals in England including Great Ormond St Hospital.
I proposed these notecards in the following article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14484528.2021.1871705
Contact:
[email protected]
@TamarinNorwood on
Belly Woman
Bedside Reading
03/07/23 • 40 min
This week contains International Women's Day on March 8th and when I started talking to Benjamin Black about hsi stunning book about his time working for Medecins sans frontiers (MSF) in Sierra Leone it was clear this was going to be the right conversation to mark today.
I was blown away by Benjamin's writing, the insight into a medical world I'd never encountered and by his kindness, compassion and warmth which comes across just as much in his writing as it did when I spoke to him.
Follow Benjamin on Twitter here https://twitter.com/BenjamBlack
Project Hail Mary
Bedside Reading
06/27/23 • 37 min
A lone astronaut.
An impossible mission.
An ally he never imagined.
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission - and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.
Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.
All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time. And he's just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it's up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery-and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.
And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he's got to do it all alone.
Or does he?
It was great fun this week to record with Mark Shapiro, host of the pheomenonally successful podcast Explore the Space https://www.explorethespaceshow.com/ which has a mission of "Examining the interface between healthcare & society, with thought leaders from across the spectrum."
This was one of the first Sci-Fi genre novels I've ever picked up and I admit I was well out of my comfort zone with a lot of the theoretical physics (which Mark tells me I don't need to understand, just believe). Project Hail Mary is at its heart a book about connection and about the value of saving our planet, and humanity. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation about the amazing community of practice that is #MedTwitter, the joy of reading, accidental CPD, equity, climate change and so much more.
Follow Mark on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ETSshow
Christmas Special 2023
Bedside Reading
12/19/23 • 33 min
A reflective look back over 2023 and some thoughts for 2024 as I'm joined by friends of the podcast to think about their tops reads of the year and their most anticipated reads for 2023.
Huge thank you to Claire McKie, Dani Hall, Anna Baverstock, Nik Kendrew, Nicola Davis, Selina Flinders, Alan Coss, Fran Boffey, Charley Baker and Derek Ochiai and Ellie Hothersall
Fighting for the soul of General Practice
Bedside Reading
09/03/24 • 34 min
I've got two brilliant guests with me to today, Roo Shah and Jens Foell, who have written a phenomenal book called Fighting for the Soul of General Practice: the Algorithm will see you now. This is a wonderful book, two GPs, one based in London, one based in rural North Wales writing about patient stories and the values of relational medicine, thinking about what we are at risk of losing as we try wholly appropriately to manage demand, to keep services running when there isn't enough money and there aren't enough staff.
But what we're losing by doing it, and whether in fact it's okay to stand up and say, "I don't want to be replaced by a computer". I've long said that the things that are of the most value are those which are not directly measurable and so I absolutely loved Jens and Roo's book. It's very, very readable and it'll make you think, but it won't hurt your head. It's not difficult. It's not dense text. They are both phenomenal storytellers, and this is really about stories and the value of what lies beneath the iceberg, the tip of the iceberg perhaps being a diagnosis but recognising there is so so much more going on and really what we risk losing if we don't remember that.
I love the book and I have really really enjoyed talking to Jens and Roo and I would really strongly encourage you to go and buy yourself a copy of this book as soon as you possibly can.
Roo mentions the brilliant short story The Machine Stops by E M Forster you can read it online here: http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/59/59.pdf
Queenie
Bedside Reading
09/05/23 • 39 min
Queenie Jenkins is a twenty-five-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places...including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth.
As Queenie careens from one questionable decision to another, she finds herself wondering, “What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who do you want to be?”—all of the questions today’s woman must face in a world trying to answer them for her.
It was a great pleasure to welcome Sabina Dosani back to Bedside reading this week to talk about Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams.
We discuss sex, bodies, intersectionality, expectations and how we make sense of narratives when we dislike the protagonists (much like how we connect with patients we don't like)
Follow Sabina on Twitter here:
https://twitter.com/DrSabinaDosani
we mentioned https://fivexmore.org/ a campaign to highlight and reduce maternal mortality for black women.
We also touched on the book Divided by Annabel Sowemimo which Tara has now read and would thoroughly recommend. Order it here: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/divided-racism-medicine-and-why-we-need-to-decolonise-healthcare-annabel-sowemimo/6331076?ean=9781788169202 or from the independent bookshop of your choice
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FAQ
How many episodes does Bedside Reading have?
Bedside Reading currently has 179 episodes available.
What topics does Bedside Reading cover?
The podcast is about Health & Fitness, Medicine, Podcasts, Books and Arts.
What is the most popular episode on Bedside Reading?
The episode title 'Set Boundaries, Find Peace' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Bedside Reading?
The average episode length on Bedside Reading is 35 minutes.
How often are episodes of Bedside Reading released?
Episodes of Bedside Reading are typically released every 7 days.
When was the first episode of Bedside Reading?
The first episode of Bedside Reading was released on Nov 14, 2021.
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