The First Breath

How Modern Medicine Saves the Most Fragile Lives

De: Olivia Gordon

Narrado por: Charlie Sanderson

‘Fascinating and moving.' - Adam Kay, author of This is Going to Hurt

A BBC Radio 4 A Good Read choice

This is a story about the cutting-edge medicine that has saved a generation of babies.

It's about the love and fear a parent feels for a child they haven’t yet met.

It's about doctors, mothers, fathers and babies as together they fight for the first breath.

The First Breath is a book about motherhood and medicine.

Olivia Gordon decided to find out how, exactly, modern science saved her son’s life. Crossing medical memoir with popular science, The First Breath is an investigation into the pioneering fetal and neonatal care bringing a new generation into the world, who would not have lived if they had been born only a few decades ago.

The First Breath explores the female experience of medicine and details the relationship mothers develop with doctors who hold not only life and death in their hands, but also the very possibility of birth.

From the dawn of fetal medicine to neonatal surgery and the exploding field of perinatal genetics, The First Breath tells of fear, bravery and love. Olivia Gordon takes the reader behind the closed doors of the fetal and neonatal intensive care units, resuscitation rooms and operating theatres at some of the world’s leading children’s hospitals, unveiling the untold story of how doctors save the sickest babies.

Reseñas de la Crítica

Fascinating and moving. (Adam Kay, Sunday Times bestselling author of This is Going to Hurt)

Excellent . . . A serious journalistic investigation into foetal and neonatal medicine . . . reads like a thriller. (The Times)

Heartstopping (Daily Mail)

A triumph of memoir-cum-non-fiction and a love story starring our heroes, the NHS . . . Totally brilliant and touching . . . tender, well researched and unputdownable, the best book I've read in the last twelve months. [<i>The First Breath</i>] moves effortlessly between personal stories of children and cutting edge scientific research . . . [Gordon makes] us feel the great and risky adventure of surviving a difficult childhood and becoming a person: and the linked one of being a parent . . . a wonderful, intelligent writer. (Maggie Gee – BBC Radio 4 A Good Read choice)

A touching, insightful and engaging memoir. (The Lancet)

Pacy and accessible . . . It is the female experience of such invasive surgeries that remains the focus here; expectant mothers steeling themselves for “needles as long as rulers” and learning to navigate a “strange form of knowledge” about a child that has yet to enter the world. (Prospect - who named The First Breath one of the best science books of 2019)

Part memoir, part analysis of neonatal and postnatal care. It’s wonderful. (Clover Stroud, author of The Wild Other and My Wild and Sleepless Nights)

Smart, sympathetic (Sunday Times Style)

Very powerfully told. (Emma Barnett, BBC Radio 5 Live)

This touching and hopeful book skilfully interweaves medical history, reporting and – most movingly – memoir. (The TLS)

A meticulously researched history of fetal medicine and a heartfelt account of parenting preterm babies. (Leah Hazard, bestselling author of Hard Pushed: A Midwife’s Story)

We take pregnancy and childbirth for granted. Now please read <i>The First Breath</i> and be thankful for your children’s lives. A compelling and uplifting book. (Heart surgeon Professor Stephen Westaby, bestselling author of Fragile Lives and The Knife’s Edge)

A wonderfully well written, brilliant discussion of the evolution of genetics, prenatal diagnosis, fetal and neonatal medicine, ethics and popular prejudice interwoven into a framework of [the author’s] own very human story and the other mothers who tell of their experiences so graphically . . . moved me to tears. (Professor Stuart Campbell, British fetal medicine pioneer)

Exceptionally moving . . . a pleasure to read. (Professor Dame Kay E Davies, Professor of Genetics, University of Oxford )