Second Opinion

Drug addicts and desperate drunks, battered wives and suicidal burglars, elderly Alzheimer's sufferers and teenage stabbing victims. They all pass through Theodore Dalrymple's surgery, and he uses the experience of treating them to examine life for those unfortunate enough to live at the bottom end of society. He writes with a combination of dry humour, compassion and, occasionally, anger -- mostly at the inhuman bureaucracy of the system, which works against the doctors and nurses as they try to help their patients.