Woman in a White Coat

Meet 85-year old Dr Abby Waterman the unwelcome third daughter of Orthodox Jews who desperately wanted a son. She survives rat-infested cold-water tenements in London's East End the Great Depression WW2 and the Blitz. Despite poverty sexual harassment and discrimination she becomes in turn a Harley Street dentist a doctor an entrepreneur a consultant pathologist and director of a cancer research laboratory as well as the mother of four. Behind the scenes in a busy NHS hospital you witness the tears doctors shed that patients never see. Step into Abby's shoes as an 18-year-old dissecting her first body and later as a mother of young children carrying out an autopsy on a four-year-old. She undergoes treatment for breast cancer only to be told her cancer has spread to her spine. While on a ventilator following a heart attack she learns that Do Not Resuscitate is written into her notes. 'Woman in a White Coat' was short-listed for the Tony Lothian Biography Prize and the Wasafiri Memoir Prize