Skip content
Also Human by Caroline Elton
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today
Libro.fm app with gift bow

Gift audiobook credit bundles

You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.

Start gifting

Also Human

The Inner Lives of Doctors

$11.68

Narrator Rachel Bavidge

This audiobook uses AI narration.

We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more
Length 9 hours 25 minutes
Language English
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Also Human by Caroline Elton, read by Rachel Bavidge.

Doctors are the people we turn to when we fall ill. They are the people we trust with our lives, and with the lives of those we love. Yet who can doctors turn to at moments of stress, or when their own working lives break down?


What does it take to confront death, disease, distress and suffering every day? To work in a healthcare system that is stretched to breaking point? To carry the responsibility of making decisions that can irrevocably change someone’s life – or possibly end it? And how do doctors cope with their own questions and fears, when they are expected to have all the answers?

Caroline Elton is a psychologist who specialises in helping doctors. For over twenty years she has listened as doctors have unburdened themselves of the pressures of their jobs: the obstetrician whose own fertility treatment failed; the trainee oncologist who found herself unable to treat patients suffering from the disease that killed her father; the brilliant neurosurgeon struggling to progress her career in an environment that was hostile to women. Drawing on extraordinary case studies and decades of work supporting clinicians, Also Human presents a provocative, perceptive and deeply humane examination of the modern medical profession.

'Crucial and timely.' Atul Gawande


'Haunting, beautiful and urgent.' Johann Hari

Caroline Elton was born in north London, the youngest child after her sister Liz and their older brother, Lionel, who was autistic. Originally trained as a teacher, she changed career direction and for the past 25 years has worked as a psychologist who specialises in supporting medical students and doctors. The author of Also Human: The Inner Lives of Doctors, Caroline was appointed as Associate Professor/Senior Adviser at Norwich Medical school in 2022. She is married, with three children, and still lives in north London.

Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today
Libro.fm app with gift bow

Gift audiobook credit bundles

You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.

Start gifting

Reviews

All agree there is a crisis in health care, but this book looks behind the headlines and tots up the human cost of a flawed system. Written with perceptive sympathy for the wounded healer, it is necessary reading for both doctors and patients. With a compassionate eye for detail and a deep understanding of just how the systems we train and practice in as doctors can fail us as human beings, Caroline Elton offers a crucial and timely reminder that doctors are Also Human. This furious dispatch from the front line of the hospital system argues we must care for our medics more... a book that may have found its popular moment. Caroline Elton is an occupational psychologist who has worked with medics for more than 20 years. She is uniquely qualified to comment... I’d be surprised if anyone who reads it will ever look at doctors in the same light again. Also Human describes, through a series of case histories... the emotional and psychological problems that doctors can face. The interesting question... is how doctors overcome such feelings and carry on working, despite often having to witness, and sometimes cause, terrible suffering for our patients. At the heart of this book is the problem of how emotional resilience can be identified in prospective doctors and strengthened in practising doctors. We are fallible human beings, not omniscient gods. Expand reviews