51¶¯Âþ

THE BEST presents are often those you want to buy for yourself and part with only grudgingly. The Healing Arts (Oxford University Press, pp 334, £19.99) falls headlong into this class. The editor Robin Downie mixes poetry, prose and paintings with cartoons, snatches of dialogue and photographs to produce a fascinating blend of medicine and art. From birth to death via madness, childbirth, old age, research and nursing, Downie’s ambitious scope is matched with powerful poems – Ann Sexton on the stony grief of a woman after an abortion, Jenny Joseph’s plans for an unruly and enjoyable old age – and prose. It’s difficult to obey Fanny Burney, for example, and read the horrific account of her mastectomy “without emotion” as she instructs her sister. But against the bitter, you can balance the rush of entertaining words from Lawrence Sterne, the irony of Joseph Heller’s Yossarian. Definitely difficult to part with.