Dame Parveen Kumar, Emeritus Professor at Barts and a Consultant Gastroenterologist

AUTHORS:  Dr Sanketh Rampes and Dr Anvarjon Mukhammadaminov 

In this series the Medspire team interviews doctors about their career, their specialty, the choices they have made and their advice for doctors and medical students.

Today, the subject is Dame Parveen Kumar, Emeritus professor at Barts and a consultant gastroenterologist. Dame Parveen Kumar is best known as the co-author of the textbook, Kumar and Clark's Clinical Medicine, now in its tenth edition. 

A podcast of this interview is available here:

 

How did you get to where you are today?

I qualified at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry. In those days you did house jobs instead of F1s. I then went to the Hammersmith, because in those days you had to go to one of the big five postgraduate centres. 

I decided I wanted to do gastroenterology and was asked to join the gastroenterology team at Barts, which had Sir Anthony Dawson, who was the Queen's physician at the time, and Dr Michael Clark, who was the second in charge. It was an extraordinary group because they had about 25 research registrars. 

It was the place to go, in those days. You had to be asked rather than apply. I was the only girl there for about twenty years. All the jokes were on me because I was female, but I didn't mind because that was fine by me. They're usually fond of you if they joke about you.

It was the most remarkable atmosphere to do research and learn about clinical medicine. We rotated around clinical medicine, doing research, endoscopy, outpatients, takes - both general medical and gastroenterology takes. It was also an interesting time in gastroenterology, because at that time we didn't have ultrasound, we had barium meals. We didn't even have endoscopy. 

Over the years, as machinery and technology developed, we got endoscopes and endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP), to try and picture what's in the bowel duct. Then the proton pump inhibitors came in, so that really stopped ulcers. Then we realised that Helicobacter pylori caused all the ulcers in the stomach and duodenum. 

I remember a consultant who used to do something like 356 gastric operations a year, who suddenly, after the discovery of proton pump inhibitors, was just doing a few, half-a-dozen or so - usually for complications. 

Life has changed enormously over the years in gastroenterology. I’ve carried on in gastroenterology and general medicine throughout my life, and done other things outside, which either I was asked to do or wanted to do.

 

What attracted you to gastroenterology as a career?

It was when Sir Anthony Dawson came to Barts, and I saw him as an incredibly intelligent man, who was a very good physician, and researcher. I thought: ‘Maybe I want to be like him’, and that's why when I was asked to join the team, I did. At that time, I didn't think I'd done enough medicine, but in fact, the way they trained you over the years, I did have enough medicine under my belt. 

Then I became a consultant at Barts, the Homerton, and then later the London, when Barts and the London joined. I used to have three teams and would whizz around doing various things as quickly as I could - which was very difficult - on three different sites. 

Each time you had your general medical team, your gastroenterology team, and your house officers. I remember at the end of a year, trying to do endless references for all of them, which was quite difficult. But it was a great career because at the Homerton I saw the world. 

Nowadays, you've got to be a doctor for the world. We saw all the diseases that were coming into the North East of London, where there were many ethnic minorities. You saw the inequalities as well there. I would see TB, malaria daily, and Strongyloides. I even diagnosed a case of leprosy in a gastro clinic, but mainly because I always did a proper examination and a history on every patient. 

I couldn't have asked for better in terms of training and medicine. The gastroenterology I did mainly at Barts, and also, endoscopy. I ran the gastroenterology team at the Homerton as well, while the research was mainly at Barts.

 

What advance made the biggest difference in gastroenterology?

Endoscopy enabled us to do a lot of things. For example, if you had a colonic polyp, in the olden days, patients would present with bleeding, PR, and you'd have to do a barium enema. That may not pick it up if there's bleeding or not. With a colonoscope, you see the polyp, see it bleeding, lasso it with a hot wire, and bring it out and look at it under the microscope to see whether the patient has cancer or not. 

Endoscopy has advanced enormously. In those days, there wasn't a gastroenterologist in every hospital. Now, there are five or six in most hospitals because of the workload. The second biggest advance was the medication - proton pump inhibitors, the H2-receptor antagonists, and finding out about Helicobacter pylori. That totally changed gastric medicine.

In terms of the liver, I remember in those days, if we looked at the liver biochemistry and found that there was an inflammation and your enzymes were raised, we didn't know what it was due to because we didn't know about it. 

We were just beginning to know about hepatitis B. We didn't know about hepatitis C or autoimmune. Often  - this was just before my time - clinicians used to give wash-outs with steroids. Patients either survived if they had autoimmune, or they died if they didn't, but at least you managed to help some patients. 

Now, we know how to treat hepatitis B. Hepatitis C, which we last found out about, has been an extraordinary story. We can now more or less cure or maintain hepatitis C, which could have been the world's biggest disease, taking up most of our money in the NHS because hepatitis C leads on to cancer if you've got chronic disease, like any other chronic liver disease. 

They were interesting times, and I'm extremely lucky to have been around at that time. That's why I keep saying: do gastroenterology, it's great fun.

 

Tell us about your strong research interest in coeliac disease and gut immunology. 

When I arrived at the Dawson firm, it was suggested I did immunology. There was a dermatologist, who had a lot of cases of dermatitis herpetiformis. My bosses said: 'Why don't you take that on?' I used to do biopsies on the gut of these patients, and found they had a gluten-sensitive enteropathy. 

Rather like coeliac disease, they would have sub-total villous atrophy, but usually with mild changes. That's what I concentrated on, along with luminal gastroenterology, and inflammatory bowel disease. Then I had this idea about doing a textbook. The textbook took over my life, but I was sad that I had to give up research. 

I could not maintain research with my couple of technicians - who I'm delighted to say did very well and became professors - and carry on doing the book, because that was just too difficult. So I had to give up research, but I carried on my clinical interest in coeliac disease. I started a coeliac clinic. The disadvantage of writing the book was leaving research, tragically.

 

How did Kumar and Clark's Clinical Medicine come about?

When I was a registrar a letter came through the post - I won't tell you who it was from - saying they were thinking of writing a textbook of medicine, and would I write the gastroenterology chapter? In those days, the secretary would put all the letters out, for the whole team. 

My MD supervisor was Dr Clark, and he stormed into my room, and said: 'What's this about?', holding my letter. I said: 'That's nothing to do with you. He yelled at me and said: 'You've got four papers you should be writing, you haven't done them. Stop doing this fiddly stuff.' In the end he realised that, in fact, I was going to do it. 

Then he said: 'Why don't you write your own book? You've always been beefing about how the textbooks were so awful and verbose.' (We had Davidson in those days, and I didn't understand a word, because it went for five or six lines. And then I didn't know what the verb was, and I wasn't quite sure whether or not I should give this drug. It wasn't very obvious.) I said: 'Fine'. 

We got together with a few of the Barts consultants - some wouldn't write because they said: 'Who's Kumar? Who's Clark?' Subsequently they have been trying to get back on the book, but we said: 'No, you weren't there in the beginning.' Our authors were absolutely tremendous. Remember, none of us knew how to write a textbook. 

I think the first chapters Mike and I wrote nineteen times. We then handed the book to students, to our peers, to registrars, and said: 'What do you think?' Then out came the three ingredients we wanted. We wanted it to be fun and easy to read, small enough to put on the back of a bike, and no ambiguity. 

We put in the fun with algorithms and pictures and colour. In those days, medicine was oh so serious. You had to have black and white and very erudite, long sentences. 

We thought if it was going to be used abroad, we'd have short sentences, with one verb and one noun, so the answer was very clear. We then paginated with bullet points, one, two, three, or four for treatment, depending on the consensus of the day. 

We didn't just take in all the scripts that were sent, we actually went through every single fact ourselves. This was weekends, nights, evenings, any time we had free. It was a nightmare actually, because in those days, we didn't have computers. The librarian at Barts was fantastic. 

On Friday evenings, we would really empty the books from the shelves, into the boots of our car, take them home, and then I worked at Mike's house on Saturdays and he worked at my house on Sundays. 

Remember, my children were small, so it was quite hard to juggle a job, bring up kids, write a book, and do a bit of research in those days as well. A hard time. I hope the book is fun for people to read. I think the nice thing about it was that it hit a time when people were getting bored with black-and-white books. 

We are told we changed the face of medical publishing by making it fun, easy to read, easy to remember, and clear, with no ambiguity. After medical schools started taking the book, we did a lot of travelling to lecture. I did a lot of examinations, teaching, all sorts of things around the world. 

We never charged for this. In fact, the book was quite interesting because instead of taking all the money ourselves, we said it ought to be for everybody, so everybody had ownership. Everybody who wrote for it got a percentage of what they wrote, whereas I think with the other major textbooks, the editors take all the money and just give you, say, a few hundred quid. 

We didn't really earn any money from it. We earnt a bit, but as my husband used to say, I would have made more from a couple of private endoscopies - and I didn't do any private practice at that stage - than I made from that book. But it was fun doing something new. Hopefully, people enjoy reading the book, which they tell me they do. 

We actually managed to do it for 30-something years. If you can imagine 30 years of this cloud being above your head all the time. After one edition, we had six months off, before we went on to the next edition. Mike was very good - he had an incredible memory. He would monitor all the key references that came out for cardiology, respiratory, whatever, including gastro and general medicine. 

Then we said to the authors: 'Here's a list of things we want, this is how we want to change it. This has come through', and so on. Then, collating it all, we had to go back and read the original papers. Often, the authors would change things in the text, but not in the tables. 

I think we were way ahead of our time. Davidson followed our pattern, because we always came out six months ahead, and then they'd put in what we put in. Sometimes a new thing or technique came out, and we would really look at it, assess it, and ask: 'Shall we put it in the book?' We would, and then say, maybe give the reference. 

In fact, we had H. pylori in the book way before most of the other books, and look what a difference it made. I could not have done it without the support of my husband, who was a chest physician. I remember once being inundated. A cardiologist author had given us something like 250 CGs, echoes and ultrasounds because he didn’t have time to sort them out. 

One Sunday afternoon, Mike and I were just looking at this, saying: 'We can't cope with this. We don't know.' We called my husband down and said: 'Can you sort this out and explain these things to me as if I was an idiot.' He drew them on the back of the envelope and I sent them off to the publishers, and said: 'Can you make pictures of these?' All the original ones were all from my husband, from the back of an envelope. 

It was the same with respiratory - the time he said: 'You've obviously got a very good respiratory professor, who knows a lot about asthma, but doesn't really know about all the other diseases.' We couldn't just have 30 pages on asthma and nothing else. 

We wrote most of the other stuff, and often had to draw on others, but our authors were wonderful in the way they supported us. One person, who was a lovely chap, said: 'Parveen, if it succeeds, we all take the glory, but if it fails, you take the rub.' We said: 'Fine.'

 

What makes a great physician?

First of all, know your stuff. You also need to understand the patient. The most important thing about being a good physician is listening. Listen to what the patient says. Often, you can get the diagnosis just from the history, and then know the appropriate test to do. Often, people do all the tests, and it's a waste of NHS money. Try to get the appropriate test in the beginning and do that. 

I remember once, I was walking down a street, when suddenly I heard a man calling: 'Prof Kumar'. He said: 'You won't remember me, I was one of your students, but I want to thank you.' I said, 'For what?' He said: 'You said something which I've always used. “If something doesn't fit, go back and take a history again”.' He said that really helped him many times. 

I often do that if things are not fitting in. You've got to work hard. Always keep the patient first, in front of you. As a physician, you're going to be a leader as well. I would say: don't ask anybody to do anything you wouldn’t do yourself. That means either it's not worth doing, or you're telling them that they're not as good as you are. 

As a leader, make sure you keep the staff below you happy, because if you're happy and having fun, then you will do better by your patients. When I used to go to outpatients, and the people at the desk had long faces and were not very happy, I would make a lot of noise, and say:  'Hello everybody, how are you? Do smile at me, please.' Then they would start smiling  

Remember, we mustn't be arrogant - we're just like everybody else. I hate arrogance in people. Another thing I don't like is complaining. If you're complaining and nothing's happening, nothing will happen. Just get on and do it. See whether there's a different way of doing something. 

People don't like complaints. If you've got a complaint, get me an answer. If there’s a problem, get an answer, a solution, and try and sort it out that way. As you get older, you're going to have to make difficult decisions. 

Always make sure that you mediate fairly and if it's difficult, make sure you task. I don't like confrontation. I think one can settle anything without having confrontation, because in the end, nobody wins. Never be angry - there's no point in being angry at somebody. If somebody yells at you, well, maybe they've got a problem. Maybe they're not having such a good time, they've got financial issues, or family issues. People, when under stress, will do all sorts of things. 

Talking about people's mental health, I was President of the Royal Medical Benevolent Fund (RMBF), and I never realised that there were many of our colleagues living in dire poverty. You can imagine the stress of it all. Then you're trying to find some way to alleviate that stress. 

You start drinking, or maybe take drugs. Then if it gets worse, your family breaks down because you're always at work, and not looking after your family. You can end up losing your job. RMBF does a lot to bring people from dire problems to being back on their feet again. 

If they've got financial problems, we will help them out there as well. If anybody's changed their character, just take it, but try and find out what the problem is for them. 

Never be angry. I remember once, a professor was doing something really ghastly, and I was trying to solve the problem. We got into an argument and shouted at each other like fishwives. It was absolutely awful. At the end of it all, neither he nor I got anything out of it by getting ourselves angry and exhausted. I find, if I've had an argument, then let's forget it, let's move on. 

The professor didn't talk to me for six months. I thought: look, we've had the argument, nobody won. Let's get on with it. There's no point in getting angry. Don't lose your temper. Help everybody, be happy, have a happy team, and encourage and teach. And it starts from the first friendly greeting in the morning. If you're the boss, that's what you want to do. 

 

You’ve held many senior leadership roles, including for the BMA, RSM, Medical Women's Federation, and NICE. What has been the driver behind these roles?

I've been very lucky because often, I was asked to take on these roles. These days, they've got to be advertised. If it was a role that I thought I could do, and make a difference, I would do it. 

The National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) was wonderful. It was started by Sir Michael Rawlins. I remember when he phoned me to apply, and I said:  'No, I don't want to do it.’ They kept on, so I applied, rather begrudgingly because I didn't think it would work. I had quite a tough interview. 

Then the Secretary of State Frank Dobson wanted to see me. I was told I had to turn up somewhere, and I said, 'I can't’ - I was actually chairing a meeting at the college. They said: 'No, that's the time you've got to turn up.' It was a fifteen-minute interview. 

Forty-five minutes later, we were still yelling at each other, in the nicest possible way because I said: 'Why don't I interview you, and see how you're going to do it?' At the end of the interview he said: 'Will you take the job? If you have any problems let me know and we can sort it out.' 

I said: 'Well, you have to offer me the job.' He said: 'Well, I'm offering you the job!' I said: 'Thank you very much, can I ask one last question?' You can probably think of him withering at this.  He said: 'What's that?' And I said: 'Will it work?' He stopped, and looked at me, and said: 'No, but we'll have a bloody good try at it.' I said: 'Thank you, sir, I'll have the job.' 

You started off with a clean sheet, and very little money. Mike Rawlins had to get a team together and trustees together. We had to persuade the whole of the country that clinical and cost-effectiveness was now the right thing. We weren't allowed to use the word rationing because it wasn't quite rationing. 

I was sad I had to leave after three years - I had to give in my resignation because I then became chairman of the Medicines Commission for the UK, which is, obviously, a very big body, and somebody thought there was a conflict of interest, although I didn't see it. 

One was clinical cost-effectiveness, the other was safety, quality, and efficacy. Totally different. But I didn't want to upset either of the super teams by somebody saying it's a conflict of interest, so I resigned from one and took on the other.

 

What have you learnt about leadership during your career?

Leadership is difficult, isn't it? I think when you're a leader, you've got to listen. To be a leader, you need to take the people with you because then they can all understand where you're going and we can all work together. 

Leadership is a funny thing - you can do it in several ways. I often try to lead from the back, but if there's a problem, I'll lead from the front, so I can take the blame. Helping everybody to develop, and taking control - that ‘we're going to do this together’ attitude. A team that does that gets much further on. 

Leadership is also about listening to other people, and mediating fairly, with good evidence, because otherwise, you're not going to get anywhere. These are the sorts of things I would tell you to do as a leader.

 

You've done a lot of work to elevate women in medicine. How far have we come, and how much further do we have to go?

We've come a huge way. I've been around for centuries, but when I was a medical student, there were eight of us, and 160 men or so, which was difficult. It was all male-led. I realised that you had to 

work a little bit harder and be a little bit better than the boys to get there. I remember working very hard on a patient all weekend, and trying my best, and the patient survived. 

I went up to him in the morning and said, 'Hi, Mr Smith', and he said: 'I'm fine, miss. Thank you very much for coming, but when's the bloody doctor coming?' I said: 'Well, I'm sorry to say, but I am the doctor. I am the consultant.' It wasn't just the men around you, it was the general perception from the public that a doctor is a ‘he’. 

Throughout my life I've put women forward. What I've always said is that I don't like quotas, I like women to get there on their own. Therefore, you need to train women better. Now it's wonderful. While we still haven't got enough female consultants, particularly in surgery - that still is regarded as a male area - we've got some super women consultants. 

I never joined a women's team. I wouldn't join a women's society because I felt I could find something better for women outside of a society. When more women started coming into medicine, that's when I became President of the Medical Women's Federation. 

I hadn't realised how women were still being kept down, usually by overpowering male consultants. As I said, there's no reason for shouting and belittling anybody. You've got to take everybody as they are. People are people. 

Women in medicine are doing well, but we’ve a long way to go yet. We've come a long way since Elizabeth Garrett Anderson's time. If it hadn't been for women pioneers in medicine and the suffragettes, we wouldn’t be where we are now. That's not so in every country. If you go to the lower or middle-income countries, women are still regarded as second-class citizens. 

If there's any wars, any conflict, immigration or migration, it's always the women and the children who suffer. They're taken and raped, and the children disappear, again, for similar sexual reasons. Look after women. 

 

How have you managed to maintain your love of medicine throughout your career?

I stopped clinical work about 14 months ago, mainly because it was all online and I just couldn't do it and didn't like it. But I'm still involved with various things medical. I'm a non-exec and I do many other things as well. 

I was with the NHS for 45 years. I should get a platinum plaque for that. I loved it. I loved getting out of bed every morning and going in. You had a team, and they were all working towards one end, which was giving the best to your patients and trying to help them. Aren't we lucky to be in such a wonderful profession, where it's altruistic? 

Obviously, you need to know your stuff to be able to deliver that. It incorporates science, teaching, looking after people, caring for people, and fun. What else do you want? That's what keeps me going. 

 

What are your proudest achievements?

I'm very proud of my family. And looking after patients has also given me the greatest joy. As they leave and they're going out, they say: 'Thank you, doctor.' Isn’t that wonderful? That's enough recompense for anything. 

In terms of achievements, it’s the book [Kumar and Clark's Clinical Medicine], because people tell me that it's trained generations of people, who've been brought up on it. It was jolly hard work - every night, every weekend, every holiday, and the amount of sacrifice. 

I remember going skiing with the family and my husband would take the children out and go skiing, and I would be sat in front of my desk, facing the mountains. Any little distraction was great. Even if a plane was in the sky, I would watch it all the way across the sky. Any distraction. Then you thought: you've been sitting here for half an hour, you've done nothing, so you write or edit like mad. 

Then you think: time for coffee, I deserve it. You have a cup of coffee and come back, and then read what you've wrote, and it's rubbish, so you tear it up and start again. It was really hard trying to concentrate.

My co-editor always treated me as his junior because he was the supervisor for my thesis -  my MD. He had a brilliant memory. At least we knew where we were in the bits of the book - for example, he remembered a journal two years ago that had told us something about calcium in sarcoid. We put all the latest things into the book. It has to be my major achievement. 

 

What advice would you offer to doctors about how to have a fulfilling career?

Don't waste time. Choose your path in medicine carefully. If you're not interested in something, you're not going to do it well. Try to get interested in something. If you like something, then go for it wholeheartedly. 

Remember, you're not going to be doctors just for the UK, you're going to be doctors for the world. With travel, medicine is now all-pervasive. We're seeing things that we've never seen before. 

We've got climate change coming in. This means we are going to have new diseases. The diseases that we thought we'd got a handle on, such as infectious diseases, are going to come back. We may even have the unthinkable, and have malaria actually within this country. 

We used to have epidemics of malaria here. There are going to be water-borne diseases, and new diseases which we never knew about. Look at what's happened with the pandemic. So be a doctor for the future. 

Being a doctor is all-pervasive. So always make sure you've got a hobby outside - something that you can relax with. Whether you play an instrument, play sport, go to art galleries, or sing, have something that's outside of medicine, which is very important for your relaxation. 

I’ve learnt a lot from low and middle-income countries. How they could achieve what they wanted to achieve with less money, and also about just doing things differently, and bringing this learning back to the NHS - we could do with a lot of that. There's some very good books that Nigel Crisp has written, which are worth reading. 

The most important thing is never lose your enthusiasm. If you lose your enthusiasm, forget it - you're just past it, so go on and do something else. We need somebody who's enthusiastic. 

Look after yourself. If you don't, you're not going to be able to look after anybody else. Make sure you're alright. Make sure your mental health is good. Make sure your health is good. Take exercise and eat well. Eat healthily. Above all, have fun. If you're having fun, you can do anything. 

 

Do you have any hobbies?

One of the loves of my life has been opera - I just love listening to it and wish I could sing. I used to be in the choir, but I can't sing now. I'm a trustee of the British Youth Opera, so that's kept me going for a few years, although I will finish this year. Both my husband and I are very similar. We enjoy walking, and we've walked across mountains and the Pyrenees.

In the past, we used to take a bottle of wine, and then met up with some friends who were proper Alpine walkers - but we realised, you don't do that. You take water up with you and a sandwich! We learnt to walk properly and we would do that quite well with other people. I quite like chocolate and I do like wine - not to become drunk, but the taste. 

I usually drink decent wine because it's a lovely taste, and I quite like the science behind it - where the grapes grow, how they grow, what temperature. What sort of soil do you need? How far do you plant the vineyards? Seeing what else is behind that hobby opens up huge realms. 

Keep in touch with what's going on in the world because in terms of your life, it's going to dictate it. And keep in touch with society. Society changes. Society often dictates what a doctor should or shouldn't do, which is difficult. I always find that, on a rather sad note, everybody's frightened of coming up in front of the GMC. That is awful when that happens. Often, it's not your fault, it's the system's fault. 

Once you're fingered, then a red flag goes up against your name. So make sure you know medicine well. If you want advice, ask for advice. If I didn't know something, I used to ask the nurses because they've been on the wards for a long time, 'Is this appropriate?' 'Is this how you do it?', if I haven't done it before. Don't think that you're invincible. 

 

Have you had any setbacks?

There have been lots of setbacks. Remember I was female, and I was Asian, so you had two of the ‘whammies’. In terms of the team, I'm sure the only reason I was the only female was that I ticked all the boxes of being foreign, and a girl. But I never saw gender and I never saw the race side - people are people, and people are very valuable. 

I didn't get a couple of jobs that I applied for. With one job, somebody on the team thought that it was unfair. There was another job I didn't get, which people said was because I was female. Well, that's their problem, not my problem. 

Obviously, you feel upset by it, but then you pick yourself up and say: ‘Right, let's go on, it's not the end of the world, there's something else I can do, so do that’. So yes, there were difficulties. 

 

Professor Dame Jane Dacre said of you: 'Parveen showed me it's possible to have it all as a lady doctor. You can be successful as a doctor, as a teacher, an academic, as a mother, and as a person. It's okay to do all of these things, and still be yourself inside.' 

That's so very kind of her. Jane and I had a lovely time that we shared at the Homerton, at a time when everybody had to have two consultant ward rounds a week. Jane was setting up the clinical skills. I was doing all this work outside with NICE and the Medicine Commission. 

On a Monday morning, I would go in, do my general medical take, and gastroenterology, and rheumatology. Then she would go in on a Thursday to do her general medical take, rheumatology, and gastroenterology. 

Obviously, if somebody was really ill, we visited them every day because we were there anyway, but we had other things to do. We really worked like that. Then she became president of the Royal College of Physicians, and a very good president too.

 

Are there any other people that have had a lasting impact and shaped the person you are today?

My mother. She said: 'As a woman, you can do anything.' She was one of the few educated women who'd gone to university and got a master's degree in the 1930s, when it was unheard of in India. 

She said: 'Everything is possible if you work hard enough and if you want it.' And my husband, who taught me a lot of things, including being calm! And there’s also a lot of friends, who I'd like to emulate somehow. 

 

What's your favourite book?

I can't give you a favourite book, but I like 18th century authors, like Jane Austen, whose character descriptions were just fantastic, and Dickens. And some of the American authors. I mainly like biographies and autobiographies because they teach you so much. If I was reading for relaxation, I would choose an autobiography.

 

Medspire podcasts are produced by Dr Sanketh Rampes and Dr Anvarjon Mukhammadaminov, both full-time junior doctors. They aim to inspire the next generation of doctors and scientists by exploring the career journeys of leading clinicians and researchers.