Direct Red: A Surgeon´s Story
Gabriel Weston
How does it feel to hold someone's life in your hands?
What is it like to cut into someone else's body?
What is it like to stand by, powerless, while someone dies because of the incompetence of your seniors?
How do you tell a beautiful young man who seems perfectly fit that he has only a few days left to live?
Gabriel Weston worked as a surgeon on the NHS frontlines; a woman in a world dominated by male egos. Her world was one of disease, suffering and extraordinary pressure where moral ambiguity and clinical detachment were necessary for survival. Startling and honest, her account combines a fierce sense of human dignity with compassion and insight, illuminating scenes of life and death the rest of us rarely glimpse.
'Her wisdom, empathy, morality and self-awareness are very revealing... Her writing is as incisive, precise and clean as keyhole surgery' The Times
'Brave and uncomfortable' Guardian
Product Details
About Gabriel Weston
Reviews for Direct Red: A Surgeon´s Story
Claire Tomalin Her wisdom, empathy, morality and self-awareness are very revealing... Her writing is as incisive, precise and clean as keyhole surgery
The Times
A beautiful, haunting and upsetting book. Weston's prose is cool and elegant
Sunday Telegraph
Direct Red is Gabriel Weston's memoir of the years she spent pursuing a surgical career... She examines these with an honesty that is both brave and uncomfortable
Guardian
What a terrific book. Gabriel Weston's voice is so seductive; her wisdom so fresh and earned, and unimpaired by sentimentality, and yet you sense her empathy - and scintillating honesty - behind every well-turned sentence. She leaves you feeling that if push came to shove you'd want to be operated on by her
Nicholas Shakespeare
Daily Telegraph
A curiously thrilling read, written with an elegance of expression heightened by both its clarity and economy. Weston slices into sentences with scalpel-like precision
Observer
Concise, literate, truthful and often moving... as well-written and sensitive an account, by a decent, cultivated and highly intelligent person, of the glories and miseries of the practice as are likely ever to read
Literary Review
This is a compassionate, front-line report from what can often seem like alien territory.
Daily Telegraph Summer Reads
The practice of medicine is a way of living: vivid and engrossing, it stimulates senses physical and metaphysical...It is a rare skill for a doctor to be able to communicate this rich sensorium in writing. It is a delight to read the words of one who does it so well
The Economist
A superb account of life on the grisly front line of the operating theatre
Christopher Hart
Sunday Times