Top 5 for Friday - Kids and Medicine

It's Red Nose today for Cure Kids and Warkworth Library has gone red to celebrate the occasion. That's also the inspiration for today's blog. It's a fairly eclectic (and sometimes rather vague) selection of titles, some of which have I'v read, and some which just appealed when I sat down to type today.

1. In a Heartbeat (Loretta Ellsworth). When a small mistake costs sixteen-year-old Eagan her life during a figure-skating competition, she leaves many things unreconciled, including her troubled relationship with her mother. From her vantage point in the afterlife, Eagan reflects back on her memories, and what she could have done differently, through her still-beating heart. When fourteen-year-old Amelia learns she will be getting a heart transplant, her fear and guilt battle with her joy at this new chance at life. And afterwards when she starts to feel different, dreaming about figure skating, craving grape candy. Her need to learn about her donor leads her to discover and explore Eagan's life, meeting her grieving loved ones and trying to bring the closure they all need to move on. Told in alternating viewpoints, In a Heartbeat tells the emotional and compelling story of two girls sharing one heart. I'v just started to read this book which is a recommended teen read for summer. Watch this space for a review before Christmas.
2. Sadako and the thousand paper cranes (Eleanor Coerr) After several dizzy spells send Hiroshima-born Sadako to the doctor, the budding school track star finds out she has leukemia--known as the "atom bomb disease." But she faces life with spirit and bravery. And a legend says that if she folds 1,000 paper cranes, the gods will grant her wish to be healthy again. I read this book as a child and adored it. It is gentle and sad and uplifting all at the same time. The libraries have several different versions from children's fiction, illustrated and audio to choose from.
3. The ghost map : a street, an epidemic and the two men who battled to save Victorian London (Steven Johnson). At 6am on 28 August 1854, the city of London struggled to sleep at the end of an oppressively hot summer. But at 40 Broad Street, Soho, Sarah Lewis was awake tending to her feverish baby girl. As she threw a used bucket of water into the cesspool at the front of her lodgings, it marked the start of a cholera epidemic that would consume 50,000 lives in England and Wales - and become a battle between man and microbe unlike any other. Steven Johnson takes us day by day through what happened and re-creates a London full of dust heaps, furnaces and slaughterhouses; where a ghost class of bone-pickers, rag gatherers, dredger men and mud-larks scavenged off waste; where families were crammed into tiny rooms and cartloads of bodies wheeled down the streets. And at the heart of the story is Doctor John Snow: vegetarian, teetotaller, anaesthesiologist and Soho resident, whose use of maps to prove that cholera was spread by water - and not borne on the air as most believed - would bring him into conflict with the entire medical establishment, but ultimately defeat his era's greatest killer. Steven Johnson interweaves this extraordinary story with a wealth of ideas about how cities work, ecosystems thrive and cultures connect. He argues that, with half the planet's population set to be urban, today's megacities could soon be wrestling with the same problems as John Snow and that, just as in 1854, science could be our salvation. This is just one of several books we have about or based on the cholera epidemic in the mid 19th Century. It reminds us of how doctors have had to be detectives over the years. And just how much we have to thank some of those early medical detectives. It is also a tale of a disease which can still prevail today, as the citizens of Haiti can no doubt attest.
4. Measly Medicine (Nick Arnold). A romp through the history of healthcare, hosted by the inimitable Dr Grimgrave.Includes chapters ancient medicine - Stone Age trepanning, Chinese medicine, Romans, Greeks· the dodgy diagnostics of the Middle Ages· the bloody operations before anaesthetics and hygiene were implemented· Florence Nightingale's nursing revolution and development of public health· Life-saving surgery available today, including plastic surgery and transplants.· Modern miracles - new drugs and treatment. The Horrible Science crew make us thankful that we were not born in earlier times. Children will love it.
5. Urgency Emergency Picture Book Series (Dosh Archer) From a choking wolf and a girl dressed in red looking for her lost granny, to an injured spider lying under a water spout, Doctor Glenda and Nurse Percy at City Hospital have a lot to deal with in this lovely series of early read picture books. I haven't seen them yet, but I love books that put a new twist on old tales, so will be looking out for these.

Of course, honourable mentions need to go to my favourite Jodi Picoult novel My Sister's Keeper, my favourite TV show Grey's Anatomy and stories about Helen Keller and her teacher Annie Sullivan (another favourite from when I was growing up).

Take care everyone. Have a fantastic weekend.