#BlogTour-‘Are you the f***ing doctor?’ by Dr Liam Farrell

Thank you so much to Anne Cater of Random Things for the invite to this brilliant blogtour!
‘Are you the F***ing Doctor?’ by Liam Farrell is out now in paperback!

About the book…

General practice is the great unknown. We stand on the cusp of the beyond. Science takes us only so far, then the maps stop in the grey areas of intuition, imagination and feelings: here be dragons. Lurching from heart-breaking tragedy to high farce, we are the Renaissance men and women of medicine; our art is intangible. Anything can walk through our door…’

Family doctor, Irishman, musician, award-winning author, anarchist and recovering morphine addict, Liam became a columnist for the BMJ in 1994. He went on to write for many major publications, winning a series of prestigious awards; in 2005, he was the first doctor to win Columnist of the Year in the Periodical Publishers Association awards.

The book contains a selection of Liam’s best work, from his columns, blogs and short stories.Brilliantly funny, glittering with literary allusion and darkly wicked humour, this book is much more than a collection of stand-alone anecdotes and whimsical reflections, rather a compelling chronicle of the daily struggles – and personal costs – of a doctor at the coalface.

What did I love about this book?

Well there is the fact that I have a keen interest in medical memoirs as an almost nurse and ex-midwife, but what makes this such an exceptional read is it’s accessibility. It’s not aimed at those with any kind of medical background , you can enjoy this on any level as it is pure gold story telling at it’s best.

”Comedy is a way of demystifyingf those things we fear and don’t understand .We can’t be frightened of something we have just made ridiculous.”

Liam’s voice comes through loud and clear- the first part where he talks about injecting morphine may seem like an odd place to start a memoir/collection of writings BUT I think it is because once that was out of the way, he gets on to the stuff he really wants to focus on. Sort of ‘here it is, now that’s been dealt with , let’s move on and not linger!’ He does not want the focus to be on this and as I am typing I realise that I am now making it one so moving on…

”Dreams do come true Dorothy, and sometimes right in our own backyard”.

The experiences, anecdotes and musings are brilliantly sketched. In short pieces he manages to conjure an image of himself as a person not defined by his role-it is an aspect of what he does and puts him into contact with the people that he is keen to talk about as well as the situations he ends up in.

”We are slow to criticise each other becuase we understand that humans are frail,that mistakes are easily made,and that we could be the next to make one;we don’t want to cast the first stone.We also know that often bad things happen and it’s nobody’s fault ,that we manage uncertainty every day and sometimes the gamble comes unstuck…”

His family stories are FABULOUS, I laughed loud and often at the tales of his Auntz and totally agree there is a need to instal Wiis in every nursing home. It is a grand idea!

This is a book for the senses-all are engaged in vivid detail as the frailties and mysteries of the human body in all its guises are laid bare for the reader. You learn about the medical profession from the view of the insider but he completely puts his own spin on what he thinks without his pieces becoming polemics.

It’s about love and life and death, all of the pitstops along the way and the laugh out loud moments that you just know will become conversation owners -I ,for one,am never going to forget Joe and his hydrocele which he’d named ‘Norm’.

Rich in tone and tale, this is a treasury of moving, comedic and philosophical observations and life lessons learned whilst practicing the art of medicine and we are so much better off for reading it.

To conclude, please buy the f***ing book !

About the Author…

Dr Liam Farrell is from Rostrevor, Co Down, Ireland. He was a family doctor in Crossmaglen, Co Armagh, for 20 years, and is an award-winning writer and a seasoned broadcaster. He is married to Brid, and has three children Jack, Katie, and Grace.

He was a columnist for the British Medical Journal for 20 years and currently writes for GP, the leading newspaper for general practitioners in the UK. He has also been a columnist for the Lancet, the Journal of General Practice, the Belfast Telegraph and the Irish News. He wrote the entry on ‘Sex’ for The Oxford Companion to the Body.

On Twitter he curates #Irishmed, a weekly tweetchat on all things medical, which has a global following. He also co-curates #WritersWise, a regular tweetchat for writers, with novelist Sharon Thompson.
He was the medical columnist for the BBC Radio Ulster Evening Extra 1996-98; presented the series Health-Check for Ulster TV in 2002, and was medical consultant for both series of Country Practice in 2000 and 2002 for BBC Northern Ireland.

His awards include Columnist of the Year at Irish Medical Media Awards 2003, Periodical Publishers Association of Great Britain 2006 and Medical Journalist’s Society, London 2011, and Advancing Health through Media at the Zenith Global Healthcare Awards 2018.He was shortlisted for the Michael McLaverty Short Story Competition in 2008.

His twitter handle is –

@DrLFarrell.

Website of Dr Liam Farrell