Award-winning novelist, memoirist, and surgeon Gabriel Weston joins us with a profound and provocative journey through the human body.

What does it mean to live in a body?

For Gabriel Weston, there was always something missing from the anatomy she was taught at medical school. Medicine teaches us how a body functions, but it doesn’t help us navigate the reality of living in one. As she became a surgeon, a mother, and ultimately a patient herself, Gabriel found herself grappling with the gap between scientific knowledge and unfathomable complexity of human experience.

Now Gabriel joins us with a captivating exploration of the body, dissolving the boundaries that usually divide surgeon and patient, pushing beyond the limit of what science has to tell us about who we are. Focusing on our individual organs, not just under the intense spotlight of the operating theatre, but in the central role they play in the stories of our lives, a fuller and more human picture of our bodies emerges: more fragile, frightening and miraculous than we could have imagined.

Intimate, penetrating and original, this conversation will reveal an anatomy like no other, about our bodies and bonds, the richness and brevity of existence, and the thread of mortality that connects us all.

Tickets to this online event are free for members of How To +.

Praise for Gabriel Weston’s Alive:

‘An exceptional, beautiful and absolutely absorbing book. Gabriel Weston is one of the best writers around, and when it comes to medicine and anatomy, she redefines the genre. Alive is a tour of human life and bodies, but she also brings her own body, in the context of her own life, into an absolutely compelling narrative […] It is essential reading if you own a body and should be mandatory for all those who study them.’ – Chris van Tulleken, author of Ultra Processed People