Wendy Moore
Priming the Pump
Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table
By Stephen Westaby
HarperCollins 340pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
The first time Stephen Westaby witnessed a heart operation, he was an eighteen-year-old medical student hiding in an abandoned observation gallery above the operating theatre. The patient, a young woman, died amid a torrent of blood. Despite, or because of, this traumatic introduction, Westaby went on to dedicate his life to open-heart surgery, performing daring operations on some of the youngest, most vulnerable and most hopeless patients, in the process becoming a world leader in his field. Now facing the prospect of putting away his scalpel for good, Westaby has chosen to bare his own heart in a profoundly powerful and disturbing memoir.
Reflecting on a thirty-five-year career in the NHS, including thirty years as a consultant cardiac surgeon at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital, Westaby dissects his personal and professional triumphs and tragedies, using the stories of the patients who found themselves on his operating table in a similar manner to neurosurgeon Henry
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'What Bower brings sharply into focus here is how lonely Johnson is, how dependent on excitement and applause to stave off recurring depression.'
From the archive: Michael White analyses the life and leadership of Boris Johnson.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/crisis-what-crisis-3
'Sometimes, dragons’ greed can have comic consequences, including indigestion. We read the 1685 tale of the dragon of Wantley, whose weakness is, comically, his arse. The hero delivers a lethal kick to the dragon’s behind, and the dragon dies.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/terrors-of-the-sky
'We must all "shoot down the canard", McManus writes, that the World Cup is going to a nation "that doesn’t know or appreciate the Beautiful Game".'
Barnaby Crowcroft on the rise of Qatar.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/full-of-gas