Last year some of you kindly bought my house history book ‘Saints, Crooks & Slavers’, and it featured in Branchlines. Now I’ve written another book. It’s a stand-alone follow-up called ‘Pills, Shocks & Jabs - the Remarkable Dissenting Doctors of Georgian Bristol’.

This one, also published by Bristol Books www.bristolbooks.org on a non-profit basis, is about 18th century religious dissenters, mainly Quakers, who flourished in medicine. They defied prejudice against them to become some of the city’s most prominent and successful physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, and druggists.

‘Pills, Shocks & Jabs’ costs £12. Copies are available from independent bookshops around Bristol, like Gloucester Road Books, Max Minerva’s in Westbury Park or the Bookhaus at Wapping Wharf in the city centre. Or you can order direct from the publishers via their website www.bristolbooks.org and they will post you a copy.

I’ve still got Parkinson’s! But exercising my brain with this second book has done me a power of good.