Medical history on the Radio This Week

History of medicine features quite a lot on the airwaves this week.

Mark Bostridge’s new biography of Florence Nightingale is Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4. You can hear Florence Nightingale: the Woman and her Legend, 9.45-10.00am, repeated 12.30-12.45am, daily.

On Thursday’s In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg and guests Martin Conway, Gemma Calvert and David Papineau discuss recent developments in neuroscience and examine the relationship between the mind and the brain. This new knowledge of how the brain works has challenged concepts of free will and opened up new ways of understanding the mind. Yet these new ideas also seem to conform to some old psychological ideas, such as Freudian psychoanalysis. It airs live 9.00-9.45am, repeated 9.00-9.30pm .

Bob Dylan’s wonderful Theme Time Radio Hour on Thursday evening features a doctor’s themed playlist of popular and obscure tracks including Dear Doctor by the Rolling Stones, as well as Tom Waits discussing alchemy.

The programmes can also be listened to on the BBC iPlayer site.