David Zigmond
"If you want good personal healthcare - see a vet."Icarus Plummeting
Due for release in early 2026
Why do we suffer? And how do we heal?
How much of healthcare lies beyond procedural and readily-defined fixes? And what is this vast but more elusive hinterland?
Such questions are vital to understanding how we may best engage with one another’s ill-fate, vulnerabilities and our inevitable transience. How this is done very much reflects the culture of the time: all our desires, delusions, efficiencies, fears and follies. Patterns of healthcare reflect not just biomedical objective facts: they tell us quite as much about our shared yet individual humanity.
Here is an unusual and highly readable exploration of these issues – an anthology of essays sourced from a frontline medical practitioner’s notebooks as he experienced his work changing over several decades. Lively vignettes capture the more intimate experiences of healthcare encounters and the enduring residues of meaning; perspectives varifocus between the personal, the professional and the cultural.
This book’s Leitmotif? Medicine’s undoubted modern bioengineering triumphs are often at the expense of our personal ecology – sharper and accelerating treatments displace and neglect our care; commodification is easier than comfort; and technical definition eclipses personal understanding. The price we pay for this loss of balance is heavy and wide, yet – like our industrialised environmental damage – its gathering momentum is insidiously treacherous.
Yet, as the stories here show, hope lies in reclaiming the centrality of personal relationships and understandings for our healthcare.
Icarus Plummeting
Human or Cyborg?
Healthcare’s trajectory in our digital age
“If this book were a painting, it would be hanging in a gallery. It’s a work of art. If it were a landscape, it would be rolling hills and dappled sunlight. It might be a mirror, reflecting ourselves, life; what it is and what it was. It could be a finely worked cabinet displaying everything that is precious and we should keep safe.
This book hasn’t been written, it’s been crafted from years of priceless experience and observation. It’s a masterwork and a must-read.”
“Fascinating … Zigmond’s accounts from his fifty years as a frontline NHS doctor are brought to life with penetrating clarity and imagination. His engaging and colourful language illuminate, then spotlight, how our complex personal underworlds are so often out of kilter with our publicly administered responses. He shows us, too, how advances in our technology all too readily worsen this discrepancy. This is a slim volume, yet it is packed with rewarding challenges and insights – personal, social and political.”
“Zigmond does not analyse his stories, but rather invites us to allow them, by their resonance to analyse us. Through their moral sensitivity, the stories invite us to be the person we really want to be. This book is not about the ‘good old days’ and neither does it belittle our remarkable technological improvements.”
“Yet again, David Zigmond has put together a marvellous book! Doctors claim that medicine is both a science and an art, but so often we are hooked on the science and don’t give much thought to what the ‘art’ of medicine might actually mean. Zigmond shows us just what it means – it means humanity. … We need to heed what David Zigmond is saying.”
“David Zigmond’s poignant and arresting stories tell us so much about what of great value we have carelessly discounted, trampled on and squandered. This beautifully written book reminds us powerfully of so many other neglected or abandoned human possibilities.”
Icarus Plummeting is brialliant. Zigmand regrounds us: his many colourful vignettes and sharp arguments make clear the price we are paying for neglecting certain principles. … This book’s tales may touch your heart, yet chill your foresight.”
Icarus Plummeting is a very readable, highly challenging view of our culture. If you want such serious matters conveyed to you by vivid and affecting personal stories – rather than data and abstract arguments – then this is the book for you.”
Contact
For book sales enquiries:
info@filamentpublishing.com
Information and personal contact:
davidzigmond@icloud.com