We have lost the ability to deal with death. Most of our friends and beloved relations will die in a busy hospital in the care of strangers, doctors and nurses they have known at best for a couple of weeks. They may not even know they are dying, victims of the kindly lie that there is still hope. They are unlikely to see even their family doctor in their final hours, robbed of their dignity and fed through a tube after a long series of excessive and hopeless medical interventions. This is the starting point of Seamus O'Mahoney's thoughtful, moving and unforgettable book on the western way of death. Dying has never been more public, with celebrities writing detailed memoirs of their illness, but in private we have done our best to banish all thought of dying and made a good death increasingly difficult to achieve.

A brilliantly witty book about the intertwined lives of psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, surgeon Wilfred Trotter and the guru of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Ernest Jones was Sigmund Freud's closest associate and most fervent disciple. Clever, self-confident and intensely ambitious, Jones promoted psychoanalysis as a kind of secular religion. It was also an escape for him from a medical career blighted by repeated allegations of sexual abuse. Meanwhile, his intimate friend and brotherin-law Wilfred Trotter - a celebrated surgeon who dramatically saved the life of George V, and who took on Freud as a patient during his London exile - refused to yield to the seductions of the new Freudianism. A quintessentially English figure, Trotter was unimpressed by slick medical careerists, distrusted grand theories and lacked pomposity and self-regard. From the early beginnings of psychoanalysis to the illness of King George in 1928 and the final meeting of Freud and Trotter in 1939, Seamus O'Mahony tells the story of these three figures and their lives with lapidary wit and erudition. This is a book about cultish belief, healthy scepticism and the sexual obsessions of intellectual and bohemian circles in London, Cambridge and Vienna, and doctors in pursuit of wealth and fame. It brings to life a pivotal moment in modern cultural history and reflects on how and why the writings of a failed neurologist from Vienna became so influential.

Life and death in a modern hospital, from Seamus O'Mahony, the award-winning author of The Way We Die Now and Can Medicine Be Cured? Seamus O'Mahony charts the realities of work in the 'ministry of bodies', that huge complex where people come to be cured and to die. From unexpected deaths to moral quandaries and bureaucratic disasters, O'Mahony documents life in the halls and wards that all of us will visit at some point in our lives with his characteristic wit and dry and unsentimental intelligence. Absurd general emails, vain and self-promoting specialists, the relentless parade of self-destructive drinkers and drug users, the comical expectations of baffled patients: this is not a conventional medical memoir, but the collective biography of one of our great modern institutions - the general hospital - through the eyes of a brilliant writer, who happens to be a doctor.

Life and death in a modern hospital, from Seamus O'Mahony, the award-winning author of The Way We Die Now and Can Medicine Be Cured? Seamus O'Mahony charts the realities of work in the 'ministry of bodies', that huge complex where people come to be cured and to die. From unexpected deaths to moral quandaries and bureaucratic disasters, O'Mahony documents life in the halls and wards that all of us will visit at some point in our lives with his characteristic wit and dry and unsentimental intelligence. Absurd general emails, vain and self-promoting specialists, the relentless parade of self-destructive drinkers and drug users, the comical expectations of baffled patients: this is not a conventional medical memoir, but the collective biography of one of our great modern institutions - the general hospital - through the eyes of a brilliant writer, who happens to be a doctor.

A fierce, honest, elegant and often hilarious debunking of the great fallacies that drive modern medicine. By the award-winning author of The Way We Die Now.

Seamus O'Mahony writes about the illusion of progress, the notion that more and more diseases can be 'conquered' ad infinitum. He punctures the idiocy of consumerism, the idea that healthcare can be endlessly adapted to the wishes of individuals.

He excoriates the claims of Big Science, the spending of vast sums on research follies like the Human Genome Project. And he highlights one of the most dangerous errors of industrialized medicine: an over-reliance on metrics, and a neglect of things that can't easily be measured, like compassion.