Your Book Review: This Is Going To Hurt

Adam Kay’s book, "This Is Going To Hurt," offers a brutally honest and often humorous account of his experiences as a junior doctor in the UK’s National Health Service. Having been born to a gynaecologist mother and gynaecologist grandfather, Kay’s own journey into medicine was not without its share of challenges and setbacks. After an Indian medical internship, he discovered he was fond of sleep and predictable evening meals, but it was his gynaecology rotation that solidified his disdain for the specialty.

This Is Going To Hurt is, at its core, a medical memoir that delves into the junior doctor experience, a theme often explored in popular culture through TV shows like ER, Scrubs, Grey’s Anatomy, and The Pitt. However, its roots can be traced back to literary works such as Richard Gordon’s Doctor in the House series from the 1950s and the canonical text House of God, which mixed absurdity and bitterness to reflect the realities of hospital medicine.

Unlike those earlier works, Kay’s book culminates in his own decline in mental health, a topic he does not explicitly name but acknowledges through his experiences.

While the book has been read and critiqued in two dominant ways—either as a comedic exposé of NHS dysfunction or as a self-indulgent memoir that offloads exhaustion onto female patients—the book, when examined objectively, serves as a textbook case of moral injury and post-traumatic stress in a competent doctor. Kay, as both the author and index case, reveals the decline of the institution that produced him, illustrating that the system that broke him in 2010 is still producing more individuals like him in 2026.