Description

---

In The Ministry of Bodies, Seamus O'Mahony charts the realities of life in a modern hospital over the course of a year. From difficult births and unexpected deaths to moral quandaries and bureaucratic disasters, O'Mahony documents life in the halls that all of us will visit at some point in our lives with his characteristic wit and dry and unsentimental intelligence.

As the Coronavirus crisis demands more and more of the medical profession and the people who support it, Seamus O'Mahony describes his work on the front lines of a pandemic in a harrowing final chapter. This is not a conventional medical memoir: it's 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 gifted doctor.

About the Author

---

Seamus O'Mahony spent many years working for the National Health Service in Britain. He now lives and practices medicine in his native Cork, in the south of Ireland. His acclaimed first book, The Way We Die Now, has been translated into Swedish and Japanese. It won a BMA Book Award in 2017. Can Medicine Be Cured?, his sharp and witty critique of the medical profession's great fallacies and wrong turnings, has so far been translated into four languages.

Praise For…

---

“Sharp and pithy observations... An insight into the realities of healthcare that no journalist could hope to capture'” —Danielle Barron, Irish Times

“No one writes as clearly and intelligently about modern medicine as Seamus O'Mahony” —Emily Hourican, Sunday Independent

“Wonderfully funny and curmudgeonly, The Ministry of Bodies is a descent into the very bowels of modern medicine, as brilliant and candid as Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward” —Kevin Toolis

“Doctors tend to be seen as saints and heroes, but that's a picture few of them recognise. Seamus O'Mahony, a medical Dostoevsky, gives a much more interesting and much funnier portrayal of a doctor's life” —Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal

“The Ministry of Bodies has much of what we expect from O'Mahony – it's blunt, witty, erudite, curmudgeonly” —Melanie Reid, The Times

“There's plenty of interesting strangeness” —iNews

“Funny, sad, infuriating, heartening and depressing, all in almost equal measure, although the overarching theme is one of deep regret for what has been lost... There are many parts of The Ministry of Bodies that had me laughing out loud... O'Mahony has a very keen eye for the absurd. But much of it made me wince too... The moral conviction of the book is unwavering'” —Irish Sunday Independent