Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic
RACHEL CLARKE
(LITTLE, BROWN, 240 pp, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • tel 020 7799 4064

In late December 2019, Chinese doctor Li Wenliang posted that a mysterious new virus had emerged from the wet markets in the city of Wuhan. His posts were rapidly suppressed. Six weeks later he was dead, and the world was waking up to a global pandemic of a severity never seen in our lifetimes. Breathtaking is Dr Rachel Clarke’s harrowing account of life on the NHS front line in the first three months of the crisis.

Once the pandemic struck, the lives of NHS workers became consumed by the disease. Clarke’s hospice became a Covid ward, and she writes movingly about the change in her clinical practice, from a place where interpersonal rapport and common humanity were paramount to a dystopian nightmare of gowns and helmets, where staff had become faceless and patients often simply numbers. The ­disease itself was invariably serious, and ­sometimes terrifying, with patients dying within hours of becoming unwell. They died alone and unvisited, Covid stripping away even the consolation of a dignified death.