Reviews with content warning for Sexual assault - Undoctored: The Story of a Medic Who Ran Out of Patients

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Reviews tagging 'Sexual assault'

Undoctored: The Story of a Medic Who Ran Out of Patients by Adam Kay

99 reviews

chris_davies's review against another edition

dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring lighthearted sad fast-paced

5.0

Utterly hilarious - proper laugh out loud on the train funny. But also very moving at times. Brilliantly written, Kay provides the best footnotes since Pratchett. Read it.

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asourceoffiction's review against another edition

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emotional funny hopeful sad fast-paced

4.0

Undoctored sort of picks up where This is Going to Hurt leaves off. But this is more a memoir than a diary, with connected flashbacks linked between chapters. Most of these are from Kay's time as a med student, and we get a lot of insight into his journey into medicine, as well as the effect leaving it (and writing his first book) had on his life.

As with TIGTH it's really funny, but the raw emotion hits hard. The shit that this man has been through, both as a result of his time as a doctor and long predating it, is insane. It's a very messy memoir of a clearly unfinished story. Kay is searingly honest and it's incredible to read about his journey to this point.

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willoughby's review against another edition

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challenging emotional funny sad medium-paced

4.5

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ludivinev's review against another edition

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dark funny fast-paced

3.75

I didn't love the first half so much, but preferred the second one. It's both deeply personal and very funny (not necessarily both at the same time…). Kay talks about his eating disorder, being sexually assaulted and losing his own baby during his wife pregnancy and still having to work on the labour ward. At first I didn't like the way he talked about his partner but it became obvious that he was exaggerating things for the purpose of humour. This book still has interesting reflections on the life of student doctors and the NHS that make me even more grateful for the service and care I receive as a user of the NHS.

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isaarusilor's review against another edition

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funny reflective medium-paced

4.0

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marianneiriss's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

I sat down and read Undoctored over the course of one day. Having read This Is Going To Hurt and Twas The Nightshift Before Christmas, I was expecting another round of hilarious, albeit at times distasteful, anecdotes about life on the labour ward.

However, the further into Undoctored that I read, the more I realised that my expectations had been exceeded. This is definitely my favourite of Adam Kay's books so far - whilst I found the other two amusing, and as a medical student reading them is rather a rite of passage, there are only so many jokes about objects found in orifices that can be made before you start to expect the punchline. In contrast, Undoctored is much less about the patients, and much more about the doctor, something which made this a much more hard-hitting read than the light-hearted comedy I had expected.

In a series of flashbacks to medical school, life as a junior doctor, and excerpts from his life immediately after leaving medicine, Kay explores the culture of silence around mental health struggles and burnout, the normalisation of emotionally distancing oneself from patients, loved ones, and even your own emotions, and the issues surrounding medical recruitment and training. Alongside this, there are raw discussions about how Kay's own recovery from the toll medicine took on him, even after he left to become a writer. Discussing important and deeply personal subjects such as eating disorders and sexual assault in males and coming out as gay later in life, I though these chapters were particularly well-written: whilst by no means amusing in the same way as his previous books, Undoctored is a fantastic book which reveals the human behind both the stethoscope and the mic on stage.

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