Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-wq2xx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T01:53:10.002Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ten books

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Elaine Murphy
Elaine Murphy*
Affiliation:
Baroness Murphy, House of Lords, London SW1A 0PW, UK. Email: murphyel@parliament.uk
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Only ten books? A quandary: the fewer I can have the more I will expose my prejudices and uncertainties by choosing. ‘We are our choices', as Jean Paul Sartre1 said, probably not thinking of books. I'll throw in another of his lines. ‘All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books'. I would not adopt that sentiment wholeheartedly; I've learned as much from relationships and work as I have from books, but it is true that one can detect one's good and bad selves reflected in books with a clarity no other medium can provide. I am a lifelong greedy reader of anything that comes to hand. I'll read the back of a train ticket if there's nothing else available. But which books influenced me? It is well over 40 years since I chose psychiatry as a career. I can only single out books, mostly novels, which have had an impact on the way I understand other people and their lives, broadened my horizons about the often unfathomable motives and goals of patients and their families, and on the way we practise and organise our services.

Type
Columns
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 204 , Issue 5 , May 2014 , pp. 406 - 408
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 2014 

References

1 Sartre, JP. Words (trans. Frechtman, B). Brazilier, 1964.Google Scholar
2 Sillitoe, A. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Allen, 1958.Google Scholar
3 Tolstoy, L. War and Peace (trans. Briggs, A). Penguin Classics, 2007.Google Scholar
4 Tolstoy, L. Anna Karenina (trans. Pevear, R, Volokhonsky, L.). Penguin Classics, 2000.Google Scholar
5 Murphy, E, Lindesay, JEB, Grundy, E. Sixty years of suicide in England and Wales: a cohort study. Arch Gen Psychiatry 1986; 43: 969–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 Woolf, V. The Waves. Hogarth Press, 1931.Google Scholar
7 South East Thames Regional Health Authority. Report of Committee of Enquiry, St Augustine's Hospital, Chartham, Canterbury. The Authority, 1976.Google Scholar
8 Kesey, K. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Viking Books, 1962.Google Scholar
9 Wing, JK, Brown, GW. Institutionalism and Schizophrenia: A Comparative Study of Three Mental Hospitals 1960–1968. Cambridge University Press, 1970.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 Hilton, J. Random Harvest. Indo-European Publishing, reprinted 2011.Google Scholar
11 Lessing, D. The Diaries of Jane Somers. Michael Joseph, 1984.Google Scholar
12 Mantel, H. Every Day is Mother's Day. Chatto and Windus, 1985.Google Scholar
13 Porter, R. Mind-Forg'd Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Renaissance to the Restoration. Athlone Press, 1987.Google Scholar
14 Scull, A. The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900. Yale University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
15 Enoch, MD, Trethowan, WH. Uncommon Psychiatric Syndromes. Butterworth-Heinemann, 1979.Google Scholar
16 McEwan, I. Enduring Love. Jonathan Cape, 1997.Google Scholar
17 Updike, J. Rabbit is Rich. Random House, 1981.Google Scholar
18 Fitzgerald, FS. The Great Gatsby. Wordsworth Editions, 1992.Google Scholar
19 Roth, P. The Human Stain. Jonathan Cape, 2000.Google Scholar
20 Roth, P. American Pastoral. Vintage, 1998.Google Scholar
21 Roth, P. I Married a Communist. Vintage, 1999.Google Scholar
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.