The Ministry of Bodies

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.

Seamus O’Mahony spent many years working for the National Health Service in Britain. He now lives 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, and 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 three languages.