A surgeon who views patients not as people, but as timed puzzles to be solved, offers a raw and moving memoir, says Oliver Moody

The marketing bumf that arrived in the post with Fragile Lives, a memoir by Stephen Westaby, a distinguished cardiac surgeon, declared it to be a book in the tradition of Henry Marsh and Paul Kalanithi.

Strewth. When did we hand over the keys of our souls to physicians? Why is the publishing industry so stuck on this strange, but luminous sub-genre of religious writing in which doctors draw up schematics of the human condition under portentous titles like When Breath Becomes Mortal Harm?

In 1933 the literary critic FR Leavis identified scientific rationalism as the worlds present sickness. Now, in an age that is minutely obsessed with bodies, yet blankly terrified of their ceasing to be, hospitals are increasingly charged with the care of the

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Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon's Stories of Life and Death on the ... - The Times (subscription)