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Book Review
Book Review
Head First: A Psychiatrist’s Stories of thoughtful work, Head First takes the reader to hidden crevices
Mind and Body and open canyons – challenging our thoughts on medicine and
exploring the far-reaching consequences of separating ‘mental’
By Alastair Santhouse from ‘physical’. In ‘Stigma’ for example, we meet sisters Pearl
Atlantic Books. 2022. £10.99 (pb). 320 pp. and Sadie, whose isolation shows us the deep consequences of
ISBN 9781838950347 self-stigmatisation. Simon, who we meet in ‘Melancholia’,
experiences the fraught loneliness of depression, and Gary’s
frequent and baffling presentations to hospital in ‘Medical
mysteries’ teach us that the answer is not always revealed by
ever more medical tests. The patient stories are contextualised
with wide-ranging and erudite discussion on subjects as
diverse as autonomy, personality and the meaning of an
evidence base in medicine.
Dr Santhouse reflects on his years at medical school and his
utter bewilderment at the question ‘is medicine an art or a sci-
ence?’, believing then that it could be nothing but a science. His
striking memoir, however, is a powerful argument for medicine
as both. To look beyond the obvious, to understand each patient
in their own messy realities, in tears, pain and joy, is a privilege
of medicine that the author so perfectly enunciates.
This book recaptures an often neglected understanding of
the person as a whole, while being rooted firmly in a contem-
porary understanding of integrated psychological medicine. It is
accessible to the non-clinical (or clinical novice) reader, but for
more experienced or even expert readers it offers a richer
understanding of the mind–body interface and an invitation to
step back and take a fresh look at medicine.
Sarah Mehmood, Medical student, School of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine
and Health, University of Leeds, UK; Annabel Price, Consultant Liaison
Psychiatrist, Department of Psychological Medicine, Cambridgeshire and
Peterborough Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust, Fulbourn, UK. Email:
[email protected] doi:10.1192/bjb.2022.78
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of
the Royal College of Psychiatrists. This is an Open Access article, distributed
Painting vivid, exquisitely detailed pictures, this book delivers under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creative-
poignant lessons through human stories and personal memoir commons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution
told with self-deprecating humour and humility. An emphatic, and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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https://doi.org/10.1192/bjb.2022.78 Published online by Cambridge University Press
