Another Bloody Woman

Jane Somerville is a medical superstar who set afloat a new medical specialty – the care of adults who survived childhood cardiac surgery that gave them a life, but not a life like everyone else’s.

Jane entered medicine in 1948 when the NHS was newly born and London hospitals were run by a monoculture of ex-public schoolboys – well before its modern diversity developed. Her early path was tough. For her later achievements, she was showered with medical honours abroad, but we explore why her contemporaries declined her the professional credit that she deserved at home.

This is a doctor-on-doctor biography. It is an account of how - for sixty years - a professional woman held a consequential job which ran alongside a husband, four children, lovers, famous friends and an impulse to travel.

Most biographies of acclaimed professionals – mainly men – offer little acknowledgement of their domestic context, children, affairs, or the individual’s flaws; these aspects are simply curated out. Here, author and subject together decided that a biography of a contemporary woman should be a 360-degree look at her life.