A Doctor’s Dictionary by Iain Bamforth review – an almost crazily good book

These insightful, erudite and wide-ranging essays illuminate the mysteries of our bodies and our minds

First of all, the title is misleading. If you are looking for something that might, say, explain medical terms or those notes on files that doctors use to acronymically conceal their scorn (the latest example of which I saw in the Viz Profanisaurus: NEFFS – Not Even Fit For Spares), then you had better look elsewhere. What you get instead are 26 essays, shoehorned into an alphabetical schema, which started life either as occasional pieces in journals literary and medical or – worse – book reviews.

I felt cheated – until I started reading it. These are substantial essays, full of unexpected insights. Wide-ranging in theme, they deal with the questions of what it is to have a body, and what it is to have a mind. There is often, but not invariably, a medical bent to them, but the frame of reference is skewed towards the humanities. A look at the index shows that the people most often cited are Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, WH Auden, Walter Benjamin, Thomas Mann, Freud, Proust, Osip Mandelstam and Stendhal. Bamforth is one of those doctors who writes. I have a high opinion of such people. So do doctors who write. We learn as much in an endnote to an essay – “Tell Me About Teeth” – in which he wonders why there aren’t so many writers who are also dentists. “Indeed, dentist-writers might be able to provide a few lessons in modesty for doctor-writers all too ready to vaunt themselves as paragons of all the virtues.”

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