Book Bite on behalf of the Sunday Times: http://bit.ly/2Mp7HjD

~The earliest psychiatric hospital was in the Islamic world, built in Baghdad in 805 AD. These early hospitals were forbidden by law to turn away patients who were unable to pay for care.~

~[The teen] looks at the X-ray the doctor holds up, showing the size of her heart taking up too much space. She will not live. 'I have too much heart?' she asks.~

~There is a danger of forgetting what nursing is, what it means: the importance of providing care.~

~Domestic violence is the leading cause of death in Europe of women aged eighteen to forty-four, ahead of road traffic accidents; ahead of cancer.~

~After both world wars, plenty of soldiers were treated for shell shock - that is, post traumatic stress disorder. But nurses working in the war zones were not. Research about the mental-health impact of war has always been about the men, despite hundreds of women working as nurses, next to the soldiers.~

~We are taught, via the media, to be afraid of strangers. That strangers hurt and abuse children. My nursing has taught me something else: it is families who abuse their children, who kill them. Parents. Caregivers. Relatives. The people we should trust the most.~

~'Adoption is devastating, however you dress is up;' a friend tells me. She was adopted forty years ago. 'Helping a child is not saving a child. It is accepting that a child might not ever be saved, then loving them unconditionally anyway.'~