2017/29 Iain Bamforth: A Doctor's Dictionary (2015) ****

This collection of longer form journalism by a Scots doctor, poet, translator from French and German and lecturer in comparative literature is extremely varied, reflecting his many interests. It is assembled under the initial letters of the topics covered, probably for want of any other unifying theme. Bamforth is one of those extremely clever literary coves who happily wanders between science and the arts. Bertram Wooster would have recognised the type: noble intellectual forehead and the predominance of fish in the diet. Indeed several of his pieces stretched me to the limits of my slender intellect. His wife is German and he has practised as a GP in Strasbourg but he also describes the year that they spent in Broken Hill, including his visit to deep underground workings, the history of toxic dust and the dire climate. Broken Hill has been staggeringly profitable from the beginning and only this week I was reminded that Australia never suffered recession from the global financial crisis, largely because of the insatiable Chinese demand for its mineral reserves.

Bamforth loves Stendhal, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Rabelais and many others. An amusing chapter covers Kafka's fondness for his uncle, a country doctor and one of the first motor bike owners in Austria Hungary. Tuberculosis is another theme: its 19th Century associations with heightened sexuality and the Swiss sanatoria, as described in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. This particular market for health tourism dried up fairly rapidly after 1943 when Albert Schatz discovered streptomycin. Researchers estimate that around a third of people on the planet have been exposed to TB and the incidence of the disease is higher than it has ever been in total numbers affected.

Essays also cover the importance of careful looking and the dominance of sight over the other senses, the impetus to the Enlightenment given by taxonomy and the illustration of anatomy, including the Plastinator, Professor Doktor Gunter von Hagens. The "von" is apparently an affectation on the part of this master showman whose gruesome tableaux of flayed humans and animals were included in spectacularly profitable exhibitions from the 1990s. This is a fascinating book and it is uplifting to find someone so continually curious and unwilling to be pigeonholed.