Sons and Pioneers

Literature & Fiction

Bamforth, Iain

Poetry

Carcanet Press Ltd.

In this pithy abecedarium, doctor and poet Iain Bamforth takes a close look at the conflict of values embodied in what we call medicine—never entirely a science and no longer quite the art it used to be. Bamforth brings his wide experience of medicine around the world, from the high-tech American Hospital of Paris to the community health centers of Papua, together with his engaging interest in the stranger manifestations of medical matters in relation to art, literature, and culture—such as the mysterious “Stendhal’s syndrome,” which caused 106 tourists in Florence to be hospitalized due to an overload of sublime Renaissance art.

A Doctor's Dictionary: Writings on Culture and Medicine

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Following on the explorations of culture and politics in his previous collection The Good European, the writings in Zest delve into less obvious but important aspects of social life--into manual work and 'dolce far niente,' into ancient vernacular craft traditions, and the data stockpiles of modernity. Early in the book we visit the Garden of Eden with Hieronymus Bosch, where we share with him the first fruit. It takes us by way of writers, artists, philosophers, travellers, photographers, musicians, and flavours into the world of Zest--how we can find it and what its discovery does to us. Bamforth's sensuous, richly nuanced essays affect us as stories do, each one creating a world in which its arguments live and breathe, laugh and explore. His diverse interests, from Bible studies to communication theory, from photography to the impact of globalisation, and his shifts from botanising in the Garden of Eden to 'botanising on the asphalt' (Walter Benjamin) always keep in sight the philosophical issue that provides Zest's subtitle--'the art of living.'

Zest: Essays on the Art of Living

Essays & Correspondence

Lives and Letters

Iain Bamforth's third collection applies carnival licence to various kinds of histories: personal, symbolic, ethnographic, social—even to a history of representations in the 101 epigrams and “autographemes” that make up the Paris sequence “Impediments.” Away from the city, the narratives of patients based on his experience as a country doctor in the south west of Scotland, and the poems set in a mining town in the Australian outback, contribute to the social history of their communities as they examine how far a rural doctor—“a fortunate man” in John Berger's phrase—can negotiate against the sheer weight of common sense.

Open Workings

Thrown into a deep identity crisis by Bismarck's victories against the French in 1870, Alsace's divided loyalties have affected the nature of Europe itself. In this authoritative new discussion, Iain Bamforth reports from 15 years of travel, taking him from Berlin, when the wall fell in 1989, to Strasburg—the heart of aboriginal Europe. With his ear attuned to the complexities of culture and politics, Bamforth attempts to discover Europe through extra-diplomatic channels, offering essays on writers and thinkers who have done much to define the small archipelago on the edge of Asia. Classic writers such as Kleist, Kafka, and WG Sebald, as well as more offbeat characters like Alsatian humorist Tomi Ungerer, are included.

The Good European: Arguments, Excursions and Disquisitions on the Theme of Europe

History & Criticism

Scattered Limbs is a collection of anecdotes, observations and opinions which restores a mythological dimension to the most obvious and yet enigmatic of subjects, the human body. Hunting intellectual minotaurs all the way back to their obscure lairs and labyrinths in pre-Homeric Greece and written over twenty years, its entries range from aphorisms to anecdotes, which in their strangeness and baroque memorability, sometimes resemble Borges' tales of imaginary beings - though the 'imaginary' beings here are often remarkable patients.

Scattered Limbs: A Medical Dream-book

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Galileo Publishers

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