{"title":"Iain Bamforth","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"body-in-the-library-book-iain-bamforth-9781859845349","title":"The Body in the Library","description":"The Body in the Library provides a nuanced and realistic picture of how medicine and society have abetted and thwarted each other ever since the lawyers behind the French Revolution banished the clergy and replaced them with doctors, priests of the body. Ranging from Charles Dickens to Oliver Sacks, Anton Chekhov to Raymond Queneau, Fanny Burney to Virginia Woolf, Miguel Torga to Guido Ceronetti, The Body in the Library is an anthology of poems, stories, journal entries, Socratic dialogue, table-talk, clinical vignettes, aphorisms, and excerpts written by doctor-writers themselves. Engaging and provocative, philosophical and instructive, intermittently funny and sometimes appalling, this anthology sets out to stimulate and entertain. With an acerbic introduction and witty contextual preface to each account, it will educate both patients and doctors curious to know more about the historical dimensions of medical practice. Armed with a first-hand experience of liberal medicine and knowledge of several languages, Iain Bamforth has scoured the literatures of Europe to provide a well-rounded and cross-cultural sense of what it means to be a doctor entering the twenty-first century.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49540499570961,"sku":"GOR003188741","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49647355199761,"sku":"GOR006550710","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49800732705041,"sku":"CIN1859845347VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1859845347.jpg?v=1751092625"},{"product_id":"doctor-s-dictionary-book-iain-bamforth-9781784100568","title":"A Doctor's Dictionary","description":"In this pithy abecedarium, doctor and poet Iain Bamforth takes a close look at the conflict of values embodied in what we call medicine  -  never entirely a science and no longer quite the art it used to be. Bamforth brings his wide experience of medicine around the world, from the high-tech American Hospital of Paris to the community health centres of Papua, together with his engaging interest in the stranger manifestations of medical matters in relation to art, literature and culture  -  such as the mysterious 'Stendhal's syndrome', which caused 106 tourists in Florence to be hospitalised due to an overload of sublime Renaissance art.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49556197507345,"sku":"GOR007331998","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50400214515985,"sku":"CIN1784100560G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50400215695633,"sku":"CIN1784100560VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52788951908625,"sku":"GOR014622095","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1784100560.jpg?v=1778147221"},{"product_id":"zest-book-iain-bamforth-9781800172050","title":"Zest","description":"Following on the explorations of culture and politics in his previous collection The Good European, the writings in Zest delve into less obvious but important aspects of social life—into manual work and 'dolce far niente', into ancient vernacular craft traditions and the data stockpiles of modernity. Early in the book we visit the Garden of Eden with Hieronymus Bosch, where we share with him the first fruit. It takes us by way of writers, artists, philosophers, travellers, photographers, musicians and flavours into the world of Zest—how we can find it and what its discovery does to us. Bamforth's sensuous, richly nuanced essays affect us as stories do, each one creating a world in which its arguments live and breathe, laugh and explore. He has written extensively about medicine. He is, more than just a widely travelled European, a world traveller: his work as a hospital doctor and general practitioner has taken him to every corner of the planet, working as a public health consultant in various developing countries, especially in Asia. 'Zest' itself occurs in the South of France, with Tobias Smollett, as picaresque a writer and character as Dr Bamforth himself. He is provoking, digressive and often droll. His diverse interests, from Bible studies to communication theory, from photography to the impact of globalisation, and his shifts from botanising in the Garden of Eden to 'botanising on the asphalt' (Walter Benjamin) always keep in sight the philosophical issue that provides Zest's subtitle—'the art of living'.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49666111242513,"sku":"GOR012603791","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49742000849169,"sku":"NGR9781800172050","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51287496458513,"sku":"GOR014217479","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1800172052.jpg?v=1756707703"},{"product_id":"scattered-limbs-book-iain-bamforth-9781903385951","title":"Scattered Limbs","description":"Scattered Limbs is a collection of anecdotes, observations and opinions which restores a mythological dimension to the most obvious and yet enigmatic of subjects, the human body. Hunting intellectual minotaurs all the way back to their obscure lairs and labyrinths in pre-Homeric Greece and written over twenty years, its entries range from aphorisms to anecdotes, which in their strangeness and baroque memorability, sometimes resemble Borges' tales of imaginary beings - though the 'imaginary' beings here are often remarkable patients.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49737341337873,"sku":"NGR9781903385951","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51818040721681,"sku":"GOR011078130","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1903385954.jpg?v=1751281282"},{"product_id":"open-workings-book-iain-bamforth-9781857542578","title":"Open Workings","description":"Iain Bamforth's third collection applies carnival licence to various kinds of histories: personal; symbolic; ethnographic; social - even to a history of representations in the 101 epigrams and \"autographemes\" which make up the Paris sequence \"Impediments\". Away from the city, the series of narratives of patients based on his experience as a country doctor in the south west of Scotland, and the harsher poems set in a mining town in the Australian outback contribute to a social history of their communities as they examine how a rural doctor can negotiate against the sheer weight of common sense.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50913894170897,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50913894990097,"sku":"GOR011178503","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1857542576.jpg?v=1750964373"},{"product_id":"modern-copernicus-book-iain-bamforth-9780907540496","title":"Modern Copernicus","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51691983077649,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51691983143185,"sku":"GOR014364218","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/090754049X.jpg?v=1751108200"},{"product_id":"body-in-the-library-book-iain-bamforth-9781781686287","title":"The Body in the Library","description":"The Body in the Library provides a nuanced and realistic picture of how medicine and society have abetted and thwarted each other ever since the lawyers behind the French Revolution banished the clergy and replaced them with doctors, priests of the body. 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Armed with a first-hand experience of liberal medicine and knowledge of several languages, Iain Bamforth has scoured the literatures of Europe to provide a well-rounded and cross-cultural sense of what it means to be a doctor entering the twenty-first century.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52754667274513,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52754667569425,"sku":"NIN9781781686287","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781781686287.jpg?v=1763569911"},{"product_id":"good-european-book-iain-bamforth-9781857547658","title":"The Good European","description":"Nietzsche, warning his countrymen in the Bismarck era against the nationalism that sought to promote all that was anti-rational in the German tradition, exhorted them to be 'good Europeans', avatars of the enlightened economic man of the eighteenth-century. Yet as RG Collingwood observed in his last great inquiry into the nature of civilisation, a book written to the glory of Hobbes at the height of the London blitz, Nietzsche was himself a victim of the disease he diagnosed.                 In The Good European Iain Bamforth's reports on fifteen years of 'experimental living' during which his attachment to the old continent brought him from Berlin, in the week in which he saw the fall of the Wall in 1989, to Strasburg, heart of aboriginal Europe and the city of noses in Tristram Shandy. Thrown into a deep identity crisis by Bismarck's victories against the French in 1870, pilot region for some of the modern state's most radical policies (health insurance, public relations), Alsace's divided loyalties have affected the nature of Europe itself. With his ear attuned to the complexities of culture and politics, Bamforth attempts to discover Europe through extra-diplomatic channels: he offers essays on writers and thinkers who have done much to define the small archipelago on the edge of Asia, including classics such as Kleist, Kafka, Roth and Benjamin, WG Sebald and Mavis Gallant. He provides a portrait of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, a send-off for Bernard Pivot's classic literary chat-show Bouillon de Culture, a scrutiny of philosophising media pundit Peter Sloterdijk, landscapes from Provence and Bavaria, reports from Prague and Geneva, Franco-German shibboleths, a sarcastic letter from 'Kakania', and an anatomy of the Alsatian humorist Tomi Ungerer. Europe often reeks of the terminally nostalgic and the curatorial: here a sceptical Scots intelligence reaches out to Musil, Heine, Gogol, Sterne, Montaigne, Rabelais and beyond the 'standard average European' to the gallant, helpless, hero-smitten Don, in the hope that they can help him find the way towards a more generous Europe.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53056594837777,"sku":"GOR008816827","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53059014099217,"sku":"GOR002480723","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781857547658.jpg?v=1769163591"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-iain-bamforth.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}