A fascinating account of what happens in an ICU and the amazing work that goes on there to save lives. Some interesting and moving patient stories and lots of engaging insights here, written in a lively yet sensitive manner. The bad outcomes are not ignored, but the positives are focused on to highlight the incredible things that ICUs are capable of.

This was such a fascinating book . It is a whistle stop tour of what is intensive care, what it entails and how it came to be. It is made more personal by the including of the cases of at least two patients in each chapter and you get a good amount of closer as to their stories as well as learning about the medical environment. This is a more personal and serious intensive care equivalent to this is going to hurt and I would recommend to everyone interested in learning more about our health service, both personal and professional.

For some reason, I prefer taking in my non-fiction books in audio format. Maybe that's because it is a bit like listening to a teacher, or a TEDx talk that lasts for about six hours – or maybe it's because the narrator actually knows how to pronounce the long and complicated terminally I just scan over with my eyes, ha! So when @netgalley announced they were now hosting audiobooks, I was so excited.

I immediately requested Dr Matt Morgan's CRITICAL. The book is a tour of the human body, each chapter focusing on different part of the anatomy, (circulatory, gut, lungs, etc.), as Dr Morgan talks about the crucial role intensive-care medicine plays in our modern healthcare system. The book starts with the beginnings of intensive-care with the Copenhagen polio epidemic of 1952, however, listening to the book in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic was particularly powerful. If it wasn't for the pioneering work in the early fifties, who knows what the daily death toll would be in the midst of the global coronavirus outbreak.

As with all medical books, I can't help but think of just how wonderful our NHS is here in the UK. We ask so much of them, and yet they keep on giving, despite the the fact that as Matt Morgan discusses its soul-destroying to work for a machine that is effectively working against its very core parts. My partner is a medic, and him being back in the NHS is such a contrast to when we were in Australia – he still worked hard, but in Oz there was certainly more of a work-life balance.

CRITICAL is a fantastic insight into the everyday workings not only of a healthcare system and profession, but also the humans that form its backbone.

An insight of the medical and ethical challenges faced by doctors told in a sensitive manner by making reference to real events.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for sending me a copy of this book.

I managed to listen to the audio of this book, and I'm so glad I did. Matt narrated the book himself and it was brilliant. An extremely informative and great insight into what it's like to work on the ICU ward of a hospital.

I really enjoyed Adam Kay's This is Going to Hurt last year when I read it so I had high hopes for this one as well. And it didn't let me down. Probably a little bit more graphic and also more informative than TIGTH but equally as interesting.

This was a really insightful and complex look into the world of intensive care. It was really interesting and fascinating and I can't wait for the author's future works.

A sympathetic, insightful look into what it's like to work in critical care. There's a lot of depth here - interspersed with personal accounts of individual patients are musings on how we should approach intensive care and how best to work for a patient's best interest.

Highly recommended to anyone interested in putting a more personal face to medical care.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC without obligation.

Full of interesting scientific medical information but not a leisurely read!
Perfect for a budding medic!

As someone who loves medical memoirs, and reads more of them than the average person, I was so looking forward to reading this book. I have read similar memoirs from doctors working in a variety of areas but never from one working in critical care. Critical is a pretty in-depth insight into the ICU and the ways in which the body's vital organs can lead to critical care intervention.

There were several things about this book that I appreciated. I found many of the stories interesting, I enjoyed the way the book was sectioned by the bodies organs and each of the stories within the chapters were all related to that organ, and I appreciated the insight into the history of critical care medicine and how practices have developed over history.

I always find that the thing I enjoy most about these types of books are the stories of real patients the author has cared for over the years. This book was filled with interesting stories, but rather than being simple anecdotes thrown in, each story played a vital role in explaining an aspect of critical care medicine. Matt Morgan went into a lot of detail in each story, giving the reader a real insight into the circumstances and the medicine involved in order to care for these patients. However, I found that as the focus was more on the medicine than the patient involved, the stories felt quite impersonal.

While I did find this book interesting, many of the reviews I have read compare this to a medical textbook and I have to agree. Somehow, this book was both overcomplicated and patronising all at the same time. As someone with medical knowledge, I felt that there were many things overly explained that didn't need to be so simplified, but then several more complicated things which were not explained at all.

Overall, while I found much of this book to be interesting, it definitely wasn't one of my favourite books of this kind. I feel Matt Morgan struggled to find the right balance with many aspects of the book, but did provide an interesting insight into the world of critical care medicine.

I love medical memoirs and this is a great one with some amazing insights into critical care. I'd definitely recommend this one if you're interested in medical topics.

Morgan is a consultant in intensive care medicine at the University Hospital of Wales. I’ve read many medical professionals’ memoirs and I’m weary of the anonymized case study format, so it now takes a really distinguished book for me to be willing to read the whole thing. I just glanced through this one; the only segment that stood out to me was about Roald Dahl’s connection to health care in Cardiff. Dahl grew up in nearby Llandaff and lost a sister and a daughter to treatable illnesses and experienced injuries of his own. After his son’s health crisis, he also helped to devise a valve to prevent blockages in hydrocephalus, advocated for vaccination and led his wife in six-hour-a-day rehabilitation after a stroke. Morgan’s concluding advice is “work hard, ask questions and be kind to people. It is the best job in the world.”

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is not overlong, but it is full of interesting stories and insights into life, and death, on a hospital Intensive Care Unit. Matt Morgan is an engaging narrator, and I found it fascinating to read the history of some of the techniques that today routinely save lives. The ethical questions he raises are also interesting. We are now able to save many more people through the developments in intensive care medicine, but there is often a cost to pay in terms of the patient's future ability to lead an independent life free from pain, so even if we can does that mean we ought to? Each patient is an individual and what is right for one may be wrong for another. The author raises these questions with care and sensitivity and it really makes the reader think.

Critical is a warm. Informative and thought provoking memoir about the role of an intensive care doctor. Interesting case histories and a practical writing style make this an enjoyable but sensitive read.

The parts I loved most in this incredibly well-written medical memoir were where Matt talked closely and descriptively about his patients, making the reader feel as if they know them too. I found some of the more science-heavy parts a little more difficult to get through and found myself skim-reading those sections, but I did feel like they had their place in the book.

Was introduced to this genre after reading This is Going to Hurt. This is an great collection of stories that range from heartbreaking to incredible hope. Morgan's voice is engaging and it gave a really good insight into life as a doctor.

I am obsessed with this kind of book at the minute and have read lots of memoirs already so it had a lot to live up to. I did enjoy this one and thought it had lots of anecdotes and kept me interested however it wasn't as good as This is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay.

Really wasn't sure if I would like this book as i thought there maybe too much science for me, but I loved it. A great balance of science and true life stories and surprised me how full of humanity and heart it was.

"What is important therefore is what we have done in life, how we have treated others and what we leave behind"

Let me tell you, I didn't pick this up for months. I downloaded it a while ago but something kept stopping me - I think it's because I'm not a huge non-fiction person and can often find them quite dry… but this was anything but.

Dr Matt Morgan's style of writing is both incredibly informative and incredibly engaging. I was so invested in each case he discussed, almost as if seeing them in real life. Having no prior knowledge of ICUs other than what I see in hospital dramas, it was a refreshing and insightful take on what they're really like. He cleverly wove historical facts, his personal experience, and the experience of the patient into each case he discussed, and I came out of it having learnt a whole lot. I didn't know that Roahl Dahl helped develop a cerebral shunt, which is something I find really cool.

This book made me feel clever, as it explains the science in a way that a normal person (someone who got Cs in GCSE Science) can understand. And it did exactly what it set out to do. It explained what an ICU is like, without promoting anything, and only being clear, evidential, and real. I have an even larger respect for doctors now, and if any doctor I meet is half as empathetic and caring as Dr Morgan, I will be very lucky!

I feel better for having read this, and I recommend that you do too.

4/5 stars.

Thank you Netgalley and publisher for letting me have a copy of this before it is published.

I find things that are medical fascinating and sometimes things which explain death and I found this a really good book on working in an Intensive Care Unit. I have a friend who works in an ICU and she has told me stories but I often thought they may have been a bit over the top until I read this. I found Dr Morgan to be is extremely moving particular in his approach.

Critical is one of those books you’ll find yourself reading out passages to people. Everything from what could kill you to how talking to someone who has lost someone (which I do now and again in my job so that part was helpful) .

It is a book I would probably read again in the future and if I had the paperback I wouldn't away.

I would definitely recommend.

Reviewed on Amazon too

Dr Matt Morgan goes into depths of intensive care, guiding us around the body and the different organs as well as what happens when things go terribly wrong.

His main focus is on the ICU and some of the most interesting cases he has come across. He writes about his successes but also failures, where modern medicine didn’t have the outcome wanted.

I like how open he was about these things and how he didn’t shy away from the more gruesome aspects of medicine. I have read quite a few medical biographies of late and found his to be a little dry. Many of the in-depth descriptions I found myself skipping as the terms used confused me completely. That’s said, he did manage to show exactly how we keep people alive for so long and the fantastic strides that have been taken in modern medicine. If you’re not squeamish, go ahead and read it. It is truly fascinating.