Feeling the pulse of a sickening world

EXCLUSIVE: Our guest editor is a doctor whose fiction is based on the facts

Rashmee Roshan Lall

and

Mira Harrison

Feb 19, 2025

Welcome to This Week, Those Books, your rundown on books that resonate with the week’s big news story.

🎧 Would you rather listen? We do a human (not AI) readalong too.

This week we have a treat:
A guest editor, the highly skilled and talented Dr Mira Harrison from New Zealand. A UK-trained obstetrician and gynaecologist, Mira has worked in pharmacovigilance (drug safety, in layman’s terms) and was the first elected female president of the International Society of Pharmacovigilance. Not only is Mira a research doctor, she is a writer who uses fiction to examine the issues she deals with every day – disease, its effects on mind and body and the care givers who confront it.

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The Big Story:

One month on, Donald Trump’s second term as US president is having a debilitating effect on global health and wellness (and not just the rise in doomscrolling). The US, the world’s largest single aid donor, has pulled funding from key programmes across Africa and south and central Asia.

Some governments are desperately trying to keep critical care services running:

Nigeria has just allocated $200 million in its 2025 budget to plug health sector gaps caused by the aid suspension.1
Ghana’s president wants “urgent steps” to cover the estimated $156 million gap, especially for malaria prevention and maternal and child health.2

Mira,3 our guest editor, says: American withdrawal is a retrograde step for international collaboration on health and doctors fear that patients around the world will suffer the consequences.

This Week, Those Books:

Two books – a novel and a non-fiction study – by two doctors who trained and worked in the British National Health Service (NHS) and later in New Zealand.

Both picks are based on the writers’ real-life experience as doctors in public healthcare systems.

The Back Story:

On January 20, the Trump administration announced a 90-day freeze on money distributed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID)4 and that the US would leave the World Health Organization (WHO).5
The US is the WHO’s largest state donor, contributing roughly 18% of the global health body’s funding.
The loss of USAID funding for Pepfar, used for HIV-related prevention, testing and treatment, will hit African countries particularly hard.
USAID’s main recipients in Africa are: Nigeria, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, Kenya, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

This Week’s Books:

One in Three

By: Mira Harrison

Publisher: Book Guild Publishing

Year: 2024

*Mira says this photo ‘is the most medical-looking one I have’*

This is a coming-of-age story of a guy from an ordinary background who crosses social classes to become a doctor. The novel shows how James struggles through his first year in the NHS, having relationships with two different women: Jenny, a sex worker in the local red light district; and Ainslie, a trainee surgeon from New Zealand.

Mira says her intention was to show how doctors cope with long hours in underfunded health systems, unprepared for dealing with constant suffering and death. She also wanted to illustrate the sexism and bullying experienced by female surgeons as well as to challenge the stereotypes of women as sex workers.

Having published two medical textbooks and two collections of stories about women working in public hospitals, this is Mira’s debut novel. It was nominated in December to represent Dunedin, the New Zealand UNESCO City of Literature, in the United Nations campaign to promote its sustainable development goals.6

Divided: Racism, Medicine and Why we Need to Decolonise Healthcare

By: Annabel Sowemimo

Publisher: Wellcome Collection

Year: 2023

In the prologue, Annabel Sowemimo states that at no point in her medical training did anyone mention how colonialism and racism would affect her decisions as a doctor. The 12 chapters that follow illustrate how race science, inequalities and colonialism have shaped medical practice worldwide.

The author’s aim was to reinsert the stories of Black and Indigenous doctors and patients into the historical narrative. A key example is experimentation on and exploitation of Puerto Rican women during development of early contraceptive pills. As an activist, doctor and patient, Annabel reframes how we see the modern-day health systems we operate within.

This book was a 2023 finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing.

I hope you find This Week, Those Books useful, thoughtful, and…a conversation starter. It’s a small operation here at TWTB, and support from readers like you helps keep this news literacy project going.

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Nigeria makes $200 million budget provision to fill U.S. aid suspension gaps, Reuters, February 13, 2025. https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/nigeria-makes-200-million-budget-provision-fill-us-aid-suspension-gaps-2025-02-13/

Ghana presidential directive to finance minister on USAID funding disruption, X, February 11, 2025. https://x.com/FelixKwakyeOfo1/status/1889307840575054016

Dr Mira Harrison works in the Department of Women's Health at Dunedin Public Hospital, Otago, New Zealand. https://www.otago.ac.nz/news/newsroom/doctors-tale-has-striking-parallels

White House statement on reevaluating and realigning United States foreign aid, January 20, 2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/reevaluating-and-realigning-united-states-foreign-aid/

White House announcement on withdrawing the US from the WHO, January 20, 2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/withdrawing-the-united-states-from-the-worldhealth-organization/

United Nations SDG17, Sustainable Development Goals: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sdgbookclub/

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