In short, this book has had me completely engrossed during the short time it's taken to read it and I shall surely miss it now it's all read. Think I'll just read it all over again.

As someone who loves all things medical, seeing this book on Netgalley was a gift. Oooh that looks good I thought and was excited when my request for an ARC was granted.

Even so, as it moved up my to-be-read list, I did keep eyeing it with some trepidation, hoping it wouldn’t be too dry or too technical. I imagined the author to be a man in his late 50’s to early 60’s and perhaps an old school type consultant.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. This was a fascinating book and Dr Matt Morgan couldn’t be further away from the stereotype I imagined. He has written the book in such a compelling way that it honestly does become quite difficult to put the book down, at least until you reach the end of a section. One reviewer mentioned that at times the author tends to meander through stories. I know what he means but that isn’t a negative point, for me this is what keeps the book so interesting. It really is like listening to someone chatting to you about their job which also happens to be their passion.

Through the book you find out about the various vital organs of the body and what goes wrong. We start out by being introduced to the immune system, then there’s the heart, the lungs, blood, the brain and at the end – the soul. No that’s not an organ but nevertheless, the soul needs looking after too.

In each section there is a past case that will help to explain what has gone wrong and what the whole critical care team do to try to put right what has gone wrong. The critical care consultant is a team leader but it takes a whole team made up of many different specialities to bring forth a solution and Dr Morgan is always at pains to emphasise this point. As he tells you what has happened to the patient and explains some of the challenges in treating them, he will go back and take you through some of the history of how treatments and procedures have been discovered and how they’ve progressed to where we are now. The history alone is really interesting. Roald Dahl features in some of it and has made his own contribution to medical science.

Throughout the book the stories of the patients are always told with great compassion. Ethical considerations are often discussed when describing how decisions were made in treatments and procedures. All in all its a very rounded look at how critical care works and the part it plays within medicine and surgery.

An absolutely brilliant book which I’d not hesitate to recommend. Read this, and if you ever find yourself or a loved one in the dire situation of needing critical care, you’ll be confident in the knowledge that they will do everything within their power to bring about the best possible outcome.

Apparently there will be another book to follow, I’m counting down the weeks to reading it.

This book totally hits my medical memoir spot. Dr Matt Morgan has written a brilliant explanation of the twilight world of intensive care, mixing explanation, case history and reflective thoughts on what it's like to work on the very sickest patients. It's right up there with Henry Marsh's Do No Harm and I hope it wins prizes. Thoughtful, insightful, realistic and hopeful - if you like this genre of book this should definitely be on your 'to read' pile.

This was just ok.
It concentrated too much on the technical side of the stories and not enough on the human / emotional side.
A real let down.

Having worked in ICU as well as having a family member in ICU for fortunately a short period of time, I found this book hard to read at times but ultimately an interesting and insightful read. Thank you for the opportunity to read it.

I really enjoyed This is Going to Hurt and this is the second book I've tried to read since which tries to recreate the success of Kay's book. Similar to the other book I reviewed, Critical doesn't live up to the standard of TIGTH - although that's not to say it's not enjoyable.

3 stars.

Really really interesting. A great combination of science and reflection and I particularly liked the description of the history of the treatments. The book describes several "typical" intensive care cases and has input where possible from the families and patients. I flew through this book and learnt a lot.

Having worked in the medical field and finding anything to do with medicine and the human body fascinating, I couldn’t wait to get started with this book. Unfortunately, although I really wanted to enjoy reading it, I found the book rather dull and long winded and not a particularly easy read for a layman as a lot of medical terminology is used. This may be fascinating for some people but it wasn’t for me.

A fascinating insight into intensive care medicine

I would never have expected a medical memoir to be a page-turner, but this is! The flowing narrative style really encourages you to read on. Dr Matt Morgan had a pivotal moment in a bar, realising that few people outside the medical profession realise what really goes on in an intensive care unit (ICU). After all, if you are admitted as a patient, you are usually too ill to know what is happening to yourself, never mind other patients.

After an interesting introduction reminding us of the fragility of life, Dr Morgan breaks the book into the different sections of the body treated in ICU. He uses case studies of people of various ages and social backgrounds from an elderly judge to a young drug addict, interspersed with snippets about the history of intensive care. He also includes helpful background information with each case e.g. a precis of the history of smoking in the section on someone with a smoking-related illness and details of how Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in a section on someone needing antibiotics.

Dr Morgan's dedication to saving people and his caring attitude really shine through, to the extent of making home visits after discharge. He reminds us of the importance of medical research, without which medical breakthroughs would never be made. He also encourages more people to learn cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) techniques, immediate CPR being invaluable in saving lives. He even explains the mysteries of the complicated auto-immune disease vasculitis clearly in a couple of sentences.

An excellent medical memoir told clearly with compassion.

Well what a fascinating read this was.

As someone who has recently spent time in an Intensive Care Unit as a patient I was fascinated to read about it from a Dr's perspective. Each of the chapters is broken down and discusses the different parts of the body that may have been damaged or malfunctioned in some way and have bought you to the ICU. Written in an easily understandable, almost chatty style, this book gives some interesting information about how the body responds to illness and couples this with some life saving advice too.

This is both uplifting and heartwarming yet doesn't shy away from the subject of death and how the Dr's cope with the difficult decisions that need to be made.

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for my free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Loved this book. Gave a great insight into the medical world.
Heartbreaking and touching, the author has captured his world and his patients perfectly.
Would recommend!

This is a great book for anyone with any interest in the medical profession.

In the blurb it says 'Being critically ill means one or more of your vital organs have failed – this could be your lungs, your heart, your kidneys, gut or even your brain' and this is the way the book is organised. So one chapter explores why someone might be in critical care due to their lungs, another chapter is based on the heart, another on the brain and so on. There are anecdotes and full stories throughout, including some which cut across multiple chapters and there is a smattering of history, for example the first ever critical care case.

I found the book very interesting and easy to read. It is well written and medical terms are explained in straightforward english.

Thank you to Netgalley for providing an advance copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

No humour, nor should there be! This book is an insight into the workings of the NHS, our much valued NHS, at the sharpest point it can ever impact on you,or anybody's life..
It should, and does promote thoughts about yourself, difficult conversations with those you love and sympathy for those who are involved with critical care as practitioners or patients or people who care for those patients.
It is well written, thoughtful, compassionate, caring and, most of all perhaps respectful to those patients unlucky enough to find themselves included in its pages.
Compulsive reading but not a restful bedtime read.
.

Morgan gives us a fascinating insight into life in the NHS' critical care units. It is laid out in a really thoughtful way - with each chapter focusing on a different area of the body and what happens when it is damaged or fails.

Morgan writes with a lay audience in mind and does a brilliant job of making the science accessible whilst never losing sight of the human in his story. It is books like these that are really narrowing the gap between patients and their doctors - creating a deeper understanding of what life is like for a doctor and what patients and their families can expect when in hospital. It is vital that all users of the NHS appreciate how hard medical staff, and their support, work to provide such an amazing service and the toll it has on individuals.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgally for the ARC in return for an honest review.

Thank you for the opportunity to read 'Critical' by Dr Matt Morgan. I have read several 'medical' genre books and enjoyed this one particularly. Each chapter centres around medical cases related to a specific organ of the body. Dr Morgan explained the workings of both the A&E and ICU departments and I learnt a lot of useful information. I was impressed that Dr Morgan hopes to inspire all of us to not only take care of our bodies, but to learn how to help someone in an emergency.

This is an insightful and educational look at the world of intensive care medicine.

Matt Morgan explains various issues that affect patients who go into intensive care, then uses examples from his own experience to illustrate each issue effectively and sensitively.

Written like that, it sounds pretty dry, but honestly it's not. I've lived quite a privileged life so far. I've never had to go and visit anyone in intensive care. I haven't spent a long time in hospitals. My dad had a heart attack but came through it really well. I sat with my grandad as he lay dying of old age pretty much, but I missed his final hours - and he was at the end of a long and happy life. I've had babies and operations but all went quite well. But some people spend months in a hospital, even months not really conscious. This book helped make that experience real for me.

The closest I've come to intensive care is watching Grey's Anatomy. You think you know a little about medicine after watching 14 or 15 years of the same medical drama (okay maybe most people don't, but I'm sure some do), but it's all surface gloss - not an understanding of what it must really be like for the patients or medical staff who work there.

Not everything here was new to me - I'm aware of CPR, of the damage brain bleeds can do, that sepsis can strike anyone down. But I enjoyed finding out more about all of those things and hearing about how they were applied in real-life situations.

I found it comforting to know that if I go into intensive care, or a loved one does, that they should (if the staff are in the same mould as the author) be treated well, and with years of knowledge/education/medical research behind that treatment. And now I think it's vitally important that the doctors who work in hospital at all hours have enough sleep and people around them to work effectively and make good medical decisions.

Thank you to netgalley and the publisher and author for providing me with the ARC for my unbiased review

not my usual read but very enjoyable! i have read a few medical books over the last year and i found this very informative and i really enjoyed the writing style

A fascinating insight into Emergency Room medicine. I found it very interesting and informative.

This book was very well written and the author had a vast wealth of knowledge on the subject.

This isn’t an easy read by any means. It gives you an insight into how doctors deal with day to day life in medicine. There are parts of the book that are in textbook speak so it does not make it easy to read.
Thank you to both NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for my eARC in exchange for my honest unbiased review

What a brilliantly fascinating and interesting look at the work of an intensive care Dr in an NHS Hospital.
I really enjoyed this and learnt a few things too!

This is an unusual book on a subject most people know very little about - the intensive care unit. As someone who works in health care and spent some time in an ICU, I still found plenty of interesting and new information and I was very glad that Dr Morgan did not glamourise the setting. I felt he handled the cases he discussed with sensitivity although at times I had trouble following each case as he jumped from one to another within a chapter. I understood why he did this but sometimes tying up the loose ends as you go makes for an easier, if less accurate, read.
Overall, an informative and sensitive insight into a thankfully little seen area of medicine for most of us.

If I could give 3.5 stars I would feel this a fairer reflection of my opinion.