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monthly reflection on current Lapidus-related issues

November 2010

when medicine is unboxed

... surprises fly out. Taking place alongside the Cheltenham Literary Festival, this one-day conference called 'Stories, Language and Medicine', was the second Medicine Unboxed, organised by Consultant Oncologist Sam Guglani, who is based at Cheltenham General Hospital.

The day began with novelist and former psychoanalyst Salley Vickers, whose novels include 'Miss Garnet's Angel' and 'The Other Side of You', talking about the value of stories. She spoke of their importance and functions, including entertainment, whose meanings include 'receiving as a guest'. Stories are 'hospitable', they do not merely distract us. The story 'takes us into itself and nurtures and nourishes us'. It contributes to survival. It enables us to enter into states of being otherwise denied us, or that we would not want to experience ourselves, enlarging our experience and giving respite from our concerns. It reminds us of how we are connected.

Vickers referred to her own novels as well as other works of fiction such as Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' and Dickens' 'Great Expectations', and Greek myth. She observed noted that medicine is an art and that 'science is a story that gets added to with each generation' and 'whether or not we need stories, we are in a sense lumbered with them.'

Deborah Kirklin, family physician in North London and an Honorary Senior Lecturer in Medical Ethics and Humanities at University College London, described her work with medical students and 'fostering the humanism at the heart of professionalism'. Guy Deutscher, honorary Research Fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures in the University of Manchester and author of 'The Unfolding of Language', gave a presentation on the metaphors we use to describe experiences of health and illness in the 21st century and made comparisons with the language the ancient Babylonians used.

Poet Jo Shapcott, patron of Medicine Unboxed, gave a reading of poems from her latest collection 'Of Mutability' is published by Faber and was shortlisted for the 2010 Forward Poetry Prize. She commented that 'the body is the theatre in which the great drama of our lives is played out.' One poem is based on a dialogue between her and her aunt, who had dementia. Shapcott said that she felt that 'telling it in a poem would get closer to the truth than telling it in a journalistic-type narrative.' For her, poetry can be 'an opening to empathy.' Her words are part of a visual artwork that was displayed at the conference by Emma Collins. Medicine Unboxed to view it.

Parallel sessions in the afternoon included a workshop by Suzy Willson of Performing Medicine, which provides training for medical students at Barts Hospital, London. Trained in drama and a theatre director and actor herself, Suzy showed techniques involving movement and gesture to enable participants to see how students can be encouraged to think about medicine as a physical as well as intellectual discipline, and use the learning to enhance their practice, their personal resources for sustainable ways of working, and their understanding of patients' perspectives.

Delegates, who came from medical, literary and other environments, found much that was inspiring and debate was lively during the breaks. Medicine, it is apparent, 'demands...engagement with complex humanity, with vistas of uncertainty, with moral conflict and with values as often as facts. As such, medicine is arguably as rooted in the arts as science'.
© F Hamilton