A beating heart has been the prime indicator of the presence of life for thousands of years. A beating heart means life. Its absence means death. Modern medicine forces us to accept that this rule is both simplistic and wrong. A person can be dead while their heart continues to beat in their chest. On the other hand, a person can be very much alive even though their heart has stopped. A person can be alive even if they don’t currently have a heart....

Two of the commonest complaints about doctors are that they write in an indecipherable scrawl and they don’t speak plain English. You emerge from an appointment with your GP or hospital consultant, clutching a clinical case summary that seems to have been written by randomly inserting incomprehensible ancient Greek and Latin words throughout the text (I’m assuming here that it was a printed document and not handwritten, in which case you wouldn’t have been able to read it...

Mortuary

Every doctor is used to seeing dead bodies on a regular basis. As one of the group of ICU consultants, I was a particularly frequent visitor to the hospital mortuary. However, I saw my first dead body at the very beginning of my training on day one of week one in the Dissecting Room (DR) at medical school. Actually, I saw twenty dead bodies that day, one for each tutorial group, all lined up in neat rows lying on top of metal trolleys. It was the...