Showing results by publisher "Orion Publishing Group Limited" in Physical Illness & Disease

Henry Marsh has spent a lifetime operating on the surgical frontline. There have been exhilarating highs and devastating lows, but his love for the practice of neurosurgery has never wavered. Prompted by his retirement from his full-time job in the NHS, and through his continuing work in Nepal and Ukraine, Henry has been forced to reflect more deeply about what 40 years spent handling the human brain has taught him.

Medicine in the early 1800s was a brutal business. Operations were performed without anaesthesia while conventional treatment relied on leeches, cupping and toxic potions. It was said of one surgeon, 'His surgical acquirements were very small, his operations generally very badly performed and accompanied with much bungling, if not worse.' It was lucky, for the doctor at least, that his deafness made him immune to his patients' dying groans. Into this milieu came John Elliotson, the dazzling new hope of the medical world.

Leaving London to return home to rural South Wales, Robyn finds that it's her old life - same teddy bears resting on her pillow, their bodies tucked under the duvet; same view of the garages behind which she'd had her first cigarette and first kiss - but so much has changed. Her dad, the proud, charmingly intelligent self-made man who made people laugh, was in the grip of early onset Alzheimer's. His brilliant mind, which saw him building power stations and literally bringing light into the lives of others, had succumbed to darkness.

This is the book that every family needs, containing all the traditional stories that small children should first hear. Every one of them is universally known and loved: "Little Red Riding Hood", "The Elves and the Shoemaker", "The Three Billy Goats Gruff", "The Real Princess", "The Gingerbread Man", "Goldilocks and the Three Bears", "The Three Little Pigs", and "Jack and the Beanstalk".