While You Were Sleeping: The Secret World of Anaesthesia

No one knows anything about anaesthetics. Not even other doctors. Most people think anaesthetists are not doctors at all. Anaesthetists are the medics who keep us alive yet in a near-death state when we’re under the knife, desperately ill in ICU, or giving birth. They are the great generalists, working on every kind of operation, from planning for surgery to major operations such as heart transplants. They send us to the world beyond consciousness and bring us safely back again.

Consultant anaesthetist Hannah Scott takes us into the operating theatre to give us a witty, behind-the-scrubs account of everything that happens while you’re unconscious under anaesthetic: the jokes, the crises, their consequences, the surgeons and their egos, and the drugs and equipment that keep us alive and pain-free. Along the way she examines all that was happening in the life of the anaesthetist herself, from junior doctor to the top of her profession, and beyond.