Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary

doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7455.1571-a

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John Quin, consultant physician (John.Quin@bsuh.nhs.uk)

Royal Sussex County Hospital, Brighton

How to write about the death of your mother? That is the burden Rebecca Brown admirably shoulders in this short and valuable memoir. Each pithy chapter is titled after a medical term, an ever serious litany that charts the downward spiral of a life.

Rebecca Brown

Granta, £10, pp 108 ISBN 1 86207 642 1

Rating: Embedded Image

Brown's mother was an active soul who rarely complained, a keen driver based in New Mexico who travelled across the vast spaces of American desert to …