Top 10 books about psychoanalysis
Freud’s work changed fiction and philosophy as well as ideas of psychology and sexuality. From Michel Foucault to Philip Roth, here is some great writing about the talking cure
Ice baths and snow meditation: can cold therapy make you stronger?
When Scott Carney set out to debunk the health benefits of extreme cold, a strange thing happened. He tells Tim Adams about lighting his ‘inner fire’
A matter of life and death: William Boyd on the rise of the surgeon-memoir
As surgery finds its voice in literature, what are the responsibilities, risks and rewards of working in the fraught world of the operating theatre?
Sound by Bella Bathurst review – losing and recovering the miracle of hearing
This fascinating memoir of a dozen years of deafness opens out into an exploration of science, music and silence
‘As addictive as gardening’: how dangerous is video gaming?
Snooker player Neil Robertson blamed a recent drop in form on video game addiction. But was he right to? We speak to the researchers trying to find out
Wellcome science book prize goes to story of a heart transplant
Maylis de Kerangal’s Mend the Living, which tracks the journey of a heart from donor to recipient, is only the second novel to take the £30,000 award
The Nordic Guide to Living 10 Years Longer by Dr Bertil Marklund – digested read
John Crace sums up the health-giving Swedish concept of lagom, carefully using not too many words – and not too few
Simone Lia on pain
My recent experience of giving birth is the greatest pain I’ve ever endured…
Sarah Wilson on living with anxiety: there’s no sugarcoating mental illness
Her cookbook I Quit Sugar made her the face of health and wellness, but Wilson’s memoir, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, traverses much darker terrain
Joanna Cannon vows to keep working in NHS after £300,000 book deal
Novelist who began writing to relieve the stress of her psychiatry job says literary success will not stop her listening to ‘real voices’ in hospital