Bleeding, Blisters and Opium achieved a runner-up place in the People section of the Lakeland Book of the Year 2010.
The British Medical Association Medical Book of the Year awards were presented at a ceremony in B.M.A. House on September 12th 2010. The overall winner of this award was a textbook of Surgical Exposures in Orthopaedics, retailing at £153! Bleeding Blisters and Opium was awarded a Highly Commended certificate in the Popular Medical section of the Awards. Commenting on the book, the judges said: ‘This first class work is written in an accessible style which should give it a wide readership. This is how local medical history should be written.’ “… for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
Moira Briggs, in her review on the bibliophile website quoted below, uses this quotation from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, to describe the unrecognised greatness of the 18th century Whitehaven Physician, Joshua Dixon. http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2010/10/08/bleeding-blisters-and-opium-by-michael-sydney/
The book will be reviewed in the November Newsletter of the Cumberland and Westmoreland Antiquarian and Archeological Society. Illustrated talks on Bleeding Blisters and Opium have been given to the Lamplugh and District Heritage Society, the Postgraduate Centres at the West Cumberland Hospital and the Cumberland Infirmary, The University of the Third Age, Westfield Library local group, and the Friends of Whitehaven Museum. Future presentations include the Whitehaven Local History Society, and the Lorton and Derwent Fells Local History group. Michael Sydney has accepted an invitation to speak about Bleeding Blisters and Opium at the 2011 Words by the Water Festival at the Theatre by the Lake, in March 2011.
Bleeding, Blisters and Opium was the subject of an article by historian Alan Crosby in the BBC magazine ' Who Do You Think You Are?' on January 26th. Under the title, Local History in Action, Alan finds much to commend in the book. Not only does the book provide interesting detail on the diseases and treatments of the day, it also contains much unpublished infrormation on Dispensaries in general, making it attractive to a wide readership.

Bleeding, Blisters and Opium has been entered for the Lakeland Book of the Year awards, and is also a contender for the British Medical Association Medical Book of the Year competition. Watch this space.