In this collection of short stories, drawing heavily from the author's own experiences as a medical graduate on the eve of the Russian Revolution, Bulgakov describes a young doctor's turbulent and often brutal introduction to his practice in the backward village of Muryovo. Using a sharply realistic and humorous style, Bulgakov reveals his doubts about his own competence and the immense burden of responsibility, as he deals with a superstitious and poorly educated people struggling to enter the modern age. This acclaimed collection contains some of Bulgakov's most personal and insightful observations on youth, isolation and progress. This edition also includes the famous piece 'Morphine' by Bulgakov.

Part autobiography, part fiction, this early work by the author of The Master and Margarita shows a master at the dawn of his craft, and a nation divided by centuries of unequal progress. In 1916 a 25-year-old, newly qualified doctor named Mikhail Bulgakov was posted to the remote Russian countryside. He brought to his position a diploma and a complete lack of field experience. And the challenges he faced didn’t end there: he was assigned to cover a vast and sprawling territory that was as yet unvisited by modern conveniences such as the motor car, the telephone, and electric lights. The stories in A Country Doctor’s Notebook are based on this two-year window in the life of the great modernist. Bulgakov candidly speaks of his own feelings of inadequacy, and warmly and wittily conjures episodes such as peasants applying medicine to their outer clothing rather than their skin, and finding himself charged with delivering a baby—having only read about the procedure in text books. Not yet marked by the dark fantasy of his later writing, this early work features a realistic and wonderfully engaging narrative voice—the voice, indeed, of twentieth century Russia’s greatest writer.

The Fear of Doing Nothing is a critique of psychotherapy through the lens of a young practitioner training in the field. Hazanov recounts the stories of the most moving, challenging, and memorable patients he worked with during his 6 years of training. This book follows him from the beginning of his training, at the peak of his doubt and skepticism, to its end, where he finally starts to believe in psychotherapy. This is a book for an intelligent and skeptical reader who is not convinced that psychotherapy is a worthwhile endeavor and questions its usefulness and merit. In the book, the author attempts to understand what can and cannot be achieved in psychotherapy and reflects on its place today.

An army physician in pre-Communist Russia, Dr. Boris Sokoloff was elected to the democratic Constituent Assembly by the Army's southwestern sector in 1917. As someone active in the Army drives to rid the World War I regiments of their hard-core Communist groups, he was appointed head of the defense committee. The committee had been formed too late, however, and Lenin's Communists overthrew Kerensky's government. Sokoloff was in the middle of this revolutionary violence and turmoil and tells of the fall of the Winter Palace as he witnessed it and of his role in the attempt to assassinate Lenin. Later, attempting to flee across the White Sea, Sokoloff was arrested as an associate of Kerensky. He was condemned to death in notorious Boutyrki Prison, only to relieve a last-minute reprieve.

Being a doctor is a privilege; it is also very demanding and can be stressful, and to be able to look after others, we need to look after ourselves. We offer you this little book of poetry, Tools of the Trade, as a friend to provide inspiration, comfort and support as you begin work. Tools of the Trade includes poems by poet-doctors Iain Bamforth, Rafael Campo, Glenn Colquhoun, Martin MacIntryre and Gael Turnbull.

This book addresses the over-prescribing of antidepressants in people with mostly mild and subthreshold depression. It outlines the steep increase in antidepressant prescription and critically examines the current scientific evidence on the efficacy and safety of antidepressants in depression. The book is not only concerned with the conflicting views as to whether antidepressants are useful or ineffective in various forms of depression, but also aims at detailing how flaws in the conduct and reporting of antidepressant trials have led to an overestimation of benefits and underestimation of harms. The transformation of the diagnostic concept of depression from a rare but serious disorder to an over-inclusive, highly prevalent but predominantly mild and self-limiting disorder is central to the books argument. It maintains that biological reductionism in psychiatry and pharmaceutical marketing reframed depression as a brain disorder, corroborating the overemphasis on drug treatment in both research and practice. Finally, the author goes on to explore how pharmaceutical companies have distorted the scientific literature on the efficacy and safety of antidepressants and how patient advocacy groups, leading academics, and medical organisations with pervasive financial ties to the industry helped to promote systematically biased benefit-harm evaluations, affecting public attitudes towards antidepressants as well as medical education, training, and practice.

The career of Mikhail Bulgakov, the author of The Master and Margarita - now regarded as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature - was characterized by a constant and largely unsuccessful struggle against state censorship. This suppression did not only apply to his art: in 1926 his personal diaries were seized by the authorities. From then on he confined his thoughts to letters to his friends and family, as well as to public figures such as Stalin and his fellow Soviet writer Gorky.This ample selection from the diaries and letters of Mikhail Bulgakov, mostly translated for the first time into English, provides an insightful glimpse into the author's world and into a fascinating period of Russian history and literature, telling the tragic tale of the fate of an artist under a totalitarian regime.