Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today is a doctor whose

medical skills are matched by a talent for writing, which has seen her write thought-provoking,

moving accounts of what it's like to be a junior doctor, what it felt like to confront the COVID

pandemic. But perhaps Rachel Clark's most powerful book focuses on a

subject that many doctors and we, the public, find it difficult to discuss death. In dear life,

she weaves together the personal story of a daughter facing the terminal cancer illness of her beloved father

with that of a doctor who made a deliberate choice to focus her care on the dying, on palliative care.

In the process of dying, which will, of course, be the fate of every one of us,

Rachel Clark finds life lessons, which we would all do well to

learn. Hers is not a perspective delivered in soft focus and soothing tones. There is pain, grief and

rage in her stories. But ultimately, she wants us to consider this. Can death be lifeirming? Well, Rachel Clark joins me now. Welcome

to Hard Talk. Thank you. Now, you have had pretty much two decades of doctoring. How has that time

changed the way you do the job? Well, I think I was pretty naive when I started in the sense that

I went through medical school that taught me essentially how to fix broken body parts. So that's the

way you learn medicine. A sort of mechanical approach to medicine.

Yes.

So liver.

How does a liver work?

How does it break down?

How do you fix it?

Then you'll move on to heart, lungs, brain.

So you end up acquiring this kind of piecemeal jigsaw approach to fixing broken bodies.

...