Rageshri Dhairyawan Trapeze, 2024, HB, 304pp, £20.24, 978-1398718692

Medical silencing is when clinicians ignore or dismiss what patients say is happening. It stems from our assumption (often unconscious and unexamined) that the patient’s subjective and lived-experience knowledge — ‘The painkillers weren’t strong enough’, ‘My periods are heavy’, ‘X happens when I do Y’, ‘My child has something seriously wrong’ — is untrustworthy.

All patients are silenced to some extent, but some — notably, people of Black, Asian, and minority ethnicity, women, and people who are sick or disabled — are more severely and consistently silenced than others. Rageshri Dhairyawan (a consultant physician) begins the book with a personal vignette: she was in hospital with an acute abdomen complicating infertility treatment, asking for painkillers and being stonewalled. The amount of analgesia prescribed and supplied seemed to be based on someone’s opinion of how much pain she ought to have been experiencing rather than on the …