Breaking & Mending - Review

If the book This Will Hurt is the comedic memoir of what a career in medicine has in store for aspirants then Breaking & Mending by Joanna Cannon has to be the literary one. The prose flows along and the project is also in the hands of a novelist of repute which also helps . Cannon is a Sunday Times Bestselling writer who entered the study of medicine in her thirties after working in a number of previous jobs. 

The admissions tutor said she was his 'wild card'. In each batch of new undergraduates to medicine he always chose one student who was different and he he took a flutter on one each year. 

She opens the book which is searingly honest with a fantastic personal description of the three occupational health hazzards medical healthcare professionals are exposed to in the careers, namely; burnout, compassion fatigue and moral distress. She attempts to recover the humanity of those who pace the wards and corridors of acute hospitals and elsewhere.

This and other books of this genre are much needed for in the USA alone the risk of suicide amongst junior doctors in the USA is very high.