Medicine Unboxed: Recent Episodes
Medicine Unboxed
Medicine Unboxed aims to inspire debate and medicine and to inform its culture.
Medicine Unboxed is for the public, for health professionals and for all of us who will be patients one day. Despite scientific advances, medicine faces moral, political and social challenges that require the pursuit of meaning as much as knowledge. The arts and other disciplines can help to illuminate the central questions and to foster awe, empathy and humility.
Our annual events - Unboxed (2009), Stories (2010), Values (2011), Belief (2012), Voice (2013), Frontiers (2014), Mortality (2015), Wonder (2016), Maps (2017)and Love (2018) - each have drawn audiences of over three hundred people. Our Soundcloud and Vimeo archives have been seen and heard by tens of thousands of people.
Our speakers are writers, politicians, philosophers, scientists, musicians and performers. The events are theatrical, moving and challenging and are performances in themselves.
Described by Le Monde as ‘As fine an actor as she is a singer’ (Eliza Doolittle, My Fair Lady, Theatre du Chatelet), Sarah Gabriel is a singer, writer, and actor with a passion for creating work with artists of all disciplines. Arthur Jeffes founded Penguin Cafe in 2009, bringing together a talented and disparate group of musicians initially to perform his father Simon Jeffes’ legacy of world renowned PCO music, ten years after his untimely death in 1997.
Helen Gordon's books include Notes from Deep Time (Profile), Landfall (Penguin) and, with Travis Elborough, Being a Writer (Frances Lincoln). She has written about nature, science, clothes and books for various newspapers and magazines including the Economist's 1843 magazine, the Guardian and Wired UK, and is a former Granta magazine editor.
Born and raised in UK, Gurdain Rayatt is one of the leading tabla players and teachers in UK and Europe performing internationally with renowned Indian Classical musicians as well as world/crossover and fusion projects spanning several genres.
"God is with humanity. Intertwined in all the mess and unsteadiness: in the vulnerability of a baby and with the light and power of the sun."Ordained as a priest in 1996, the reverend Lucy Winkett is rector of St James's Piccadilly and was formerly canon precentor of St Paul's Cathedral, London.
Dr Sam Guglani is a Consultant Oncologist in Cheltenham, specialising in the management of lung and brain tumours. He has Masters degrees in Ethics and Creative Writing. He is director of Medicine Unboxed, which illuminates the challenges and wonders of medicine through the arts. Sam’s debut novel, Histories, was published in 2017.
Gavin Francis is a GP, and the author of True North and Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins, which won the Scottish Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and Costa Prize. He also writes for the Guardian, the Times, London Review of Books and Granta.
"One of the pods hangs low, right next to Leon’s face. Inside are five tiny black seeds, smaller than his little fingernail. He picks one out and holds it up to the sun."Kit de Waal was born in Birmingham to an Irish mother, who was a childminder and foster carer and a Caribbean father. She worked for fifteen years in criminal and family law, was a magistrate for several years and sits on adoption panels. She used to advise Social Services on the care of foster children, and has written training manuals on adoption, foster care and judgecraft for members of the judiciary. Her writing has received numerous awards including the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize 2014 and 2015 and the SI Leeds Literary Reader's Choice Prize 2014 and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. MY NAME IS LEON, her first novel was published in 2016 and shortlisted for the Costa Book Award.
"In spring things come together, blood flows into the heart and away from the heart, swallow appear and swallows vanish." Tim Dee was born in Liverpool in 1961. He has worked as a BBC radio producer for twenty years and divides his life between Bristol and Cambridge. He is the author of THE RUNNING SKY (2009) and FOUR FIELDS (2013). He is also the editor of GROUND WORK, an anthology of nature writing, which Jonathan Cape published in March 2018. LANDFILL, Tim's book on gulls, literature and landfill sites, was published by Little Toller Books in October 2018. GREENERY: JOURNEYS IN THE SPRINGTIME was published by Jonathan Cape in March 2020.
"Who am I? Everybody. Individuals within that multitude are always flickering on and off within me, stepping forward, then receding."George Saunders is the author of nine books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize, and the story collections Pastoralia and Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2006 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2013 he was awarded the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and was included in Time’s list of the one hundred most influential people in the world. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.
"What makes the difference between being conscious at all and being a chunk of living meat, or lifeless silicon, without any inner universe?"Anil Seth is a neuroscientist, author, and public speaker who has pioneered research into the brain basis of consciousness for more than twenty years.
"In an aimless universe the emergence of compassion is an evolutionary miracle, a shock as remarkable as the sudden jump into life."Richard Holloway is a Scottish writer and broadcaster, and was formerly bishop of Edinburgh in the Scottish Episcopal church.
Max Porter worked as a bookseller at Daunt Books and was later editorial director of Granta and Portobello Books. In 2015, he published his first novel, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, which won several awards including the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser and Dunlop young writer of the year and the Dylan Thomas prize. It was later adapted into a play directed by Enda Walsh. His second book, Lanny, was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn prize in 2019 and is being adapted into a film starring Rachel Weisz. Shy, his latest novel, was published by Faber in 2023.
"Dear friends, would you look, only look. For love, allied to attention, will be urgently needed in the years to come."Katherine Rundell is the author of Rooftoppers, Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner), The Wolf Wilder, The Explorer, The Good Thieves, and The Zebra’s Great Escape. She grew up in Zimbabwe, Brussels, and London, and is currently a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
Arthur Jeffes founded Penguin Cafe in 2009, bringing together a talented and disparate group of musicians initially to perform his father Simon Jeffes’ legacy of world renowned PCO music, ten years after his untimely death in 1997.Arthur, a talented composer in his own right, quickly began to create new and unique genre-defying music, with the spellbinding philosophy of the Penguin Cafe always in his mind.
"It is neither a wholly mechanistic nor a wholly metaphysical question. Yet it remains for many patients a deeply important one: What is this disease doing to me?"Richard Horton qualified in physiology and medicine with honours from the University of Birmingham in 1986. He joined The Lancet in 1990, moving to New York as North American Editor in 1993. In 2020, he published The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What’s Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again.
"The meteorite provided us with a window into the past, how simple chemistry kick started the origin of life at the birth of our solar system."Queenie Chan is a planetary scientist and a meteoriticist. Chan is currently a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Department of Earth Sciences of the Royal Holloway University of London in the United Kingdom. Her research focuses on understanding the earliest chemical reactions involving liquid water in the solar system, and how the individual events turned simple life’s building blocks into increasingly complex molecules that ultimately yielded life. Her work typically involves the analysis of the chemical and organic contents of astromaterials including meteorites and asteroidal/cometary samples returned by space missions.
Nick Lane is Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London. He is the author of five acclaimed books on evolutionary biochemistry, which have sold more than 150,000 copies worldwide, and been translated into 25 languages.
“For months or years, bodies are pressed into bodies, lives dependent on other lives. You become cargo, a piece of meat, a being that loses humanity.”Sally Hayden is an award-winning journalist and photographer currently focused on migration, conflict and humanitarian crises. She has worked with VICE, VICE News, CNN International, the Financial Times Magazine, TIME, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, BBC, and the Washington Post amongst many others.
"I’ve always said there are no mysteries, only things we don’t know; but lately, I’ve thought not even knowledge takes all strangeness from the world."Sarah Perry is the internationally best selling author of the novels Melmoth, The Essex Serpent, and After Me Comes the Flood, and the non-fiction Essex Girls. She is a winner of the Waterstone's Book of the Year Awards and the British Book Awards, and has been nominated for major literary prizes including the Women's Prize for Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Folio Prize and the Costa Novel Award.
Chamkaur Ghag is an astroparticle physicist working in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UCL. Chamkaur received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2006 following his work on novel technologies to detect dark matter. He held post-doctoral positions at the University of Edinburgh and University of California Los Angeles, continuing his dark matter research and contributing to the world-leading experiments, before moving back to the UK in 2012 to initiate experimental dark matter research at UCL.
"We have searched for correspondence between the heavens and the Earth and between nature and the human body. "Stephen Ellcock is a renowned image collector whose online “cabinet of curiosities”—an ever-expanding, virtual museum of art that is open to all via social media—has attracted more than 633,000 followers worldwide. His most recent book, Underworlds: A Compelling Journey Through Subterranean Realms, Real and Imagined, was published in the United Kingdom, United States, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He is also the author of The Cosmic Dance: Finding Patterns and Pathways in a Chaotic Universe.
"In the owl-light, / when loneliness shines / through your bones like a bare bulb." Liz Berry is an award-winning poet from the Black Country and the author of The Patron Saint of Schoolgirls, Black Country and The Republic of Motherhood.Zaffar Kunial was born in Birmingham and lives in Hebden Bridge. He published a pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series in 2014 and spent that year as the Wordsworth Trust Poet-in-Residence. Since his first public reading, of 'Hill Speak' at the 2011 National Poetry Competition awards, he has spoken at various literature festivals and in programmes for BBC radio, and won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize for his poem 'The Word'.
"The plastic bonding the metals together is polyethylene. It is literally solid petrol and will burn like it. This is what was starting to happen at Grenfell Tower."Peter Apps is an award-winning journalist and Deputy Editor at Inside Housing. He broke a story on the dangers of combustible cladding thirty-four days before the Grenfell Fire. He has not stopped reporting on this national tragedy since, and his coverage of the public inquiry has received widespread acclaim. He lives in London.
Hayley Campbell is an author, broadcaster, and journalist. Her work has appeared in WIRED, The Guardian, New Statesman, Empire, GQ, and more. Her books include All the Living and the Dead and The Art of Neil Gaiman.
Mark Taubert, Clinical Director, Consultant Physician & Honorary Senior Lecturer in Palliative Medicine at Cardiff University School of Medicine, talks to Sam Guglani about death, sadness, pain and loss in his work as a palliative care doctor, and about his own experience of - and feelings about - death.
Mark founded TalkCPR and has a national lead role to improve public understanding on topics relevant to care in the last years of life and at the extreme ends of medicine.
He has written about palliative care in The Washington Post, The Guardian, Quillette, Chicago Tribune, The Times, The Independent, The Big Issue, BBC News & HuffPost UK and appeared on BBC’s Horizon, ITV's BAFTA-winning Hospital of Hope. He has also engaged in cultural collaborations to promote debate about palliative care including ‘The Colours’, a West End show in London's Soho Theatre, a National Theatre Wales' production ‘As Long As The Heart Beats’ and has talked at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, at Hay Literary Festival and the Science Museum in London.
He featured in two palliative care themed recordings for the BBC Listening Project and his posthumous letter to David Bowie, which discussed the importance of good end of life care, went viral and has been made into a touring classical music composition and has been publicly read by, amongst others, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jarvis Cocker in locations including New York, London, Hay-on-Wye, Edinburgh and Berlin.
Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. https://realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/
Sam Guglani talks to journalist, essayist and literary critic Mark O’Connell, author of ‘To Be a Machine’ (Granta 2017, winner of the Wellcome Prize) and ‘Notes from An Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back’ (Granta, 2020).
‘To Be a Machine’ explores transhumanism - using machines to optimise human cognition and extend human life, and the Silicon Valley belief that the human body is an outmoded device. For advocates of transhumanism, death is ‘wrong’ - an idea which at first seems difficult but as Sam and Mark discuss, ‘the body as machine’ is not so far from the assumptions that underlie all modern medicine. Mark says “It’s both wrong and right to say we are machines - but we are not just machines. It’s a metaphor and the idea that we are spiritual is also just a metaphor. It all just reduces to language.”
Mortality, what it means to be embodied, our experience of time, and how we view ourselves in relation to nature, and love - and if they are reducible to the mechanistic conceptions of the transhumanists - are topics discussed by Mark and Sam in this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES. “What else could it be about but love…you could argue that the meaning of life is simply to reproduce,” says Mark, “but that’s another way of talking about love.”
Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. https://realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/
Image Richard Gilligan/LA Times https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-04-14/mark-oconnell-notes-from-an-apocalypse-intervew
Samantha Harvey is Reader in creative writing at Bath Spa University and is the author of four novels, 'The Wilderness', 'All Is Song', 'Dear Thief' and 'The Western Wind', and of a memoir, published in January 2020, 'The Shapeless Unease'.
Her novels have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, the Walter Scott Prize and the James Tait Black Prize, and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Baileys Prize, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize and the HWA Gold Crown Award. The Wilderness was the winner of the AMI Literature Award and the Betty Trask Prize, and The Western Wind won the 2019 Staunch Book Prize.
In this episode, Samantha talks to Sam Guglani about ‘The Shapeless Unease’ and how an intense and disturbing experience of insomnia drove her writing and resulted in a book which was “fragmented and disjointed in terms of interest, subjects, tone, voice and register”. As Samantha says, unease is “something that runs deep in you and somehow comes into contact with your sense of self. I tried to find something that was causing my insomnia, to try and decode it…I was deep in this knot of suffering but thought ‘how can I keep finding the most perfect, apt and succinct way of expressing this…writing is the most joyous and liberating thing in the world.’”
Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. https://realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/
Image: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/books/review/samantha-harvey-shapeless-unease.html
In this episode of Medicine Unboxed: VOICES, Sam Guglani talks to Jenn Ashworth, author of 'A Kind of Intimacy', 'Fell' and most recently 'Notes Made While Falling'.
In this discussion, Jenn talks to Sam about her encounters with doctors as a child raised in a Mormon community and about the role of fiction in her understanding of the world and of illness.
Jenn talks about her experience of becoming ill after the birth of her child, her feeling that she was “too ill to even want healing... to imagine that was even possible” and how she translated this into her writing.
“My writing changed through being ill. Previously I wanted to use writing to speak, to communicate…afterwards it’s more about listening, a process by which I shed my layers, my armour, my certainty, my expertise - and let the world get me.”
Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/
Sam Guglani talks to Professor Dame Sue Black OBE about her early childhood experiences, how they shaped her future career and about how important her teachers have been to her - and why we have a duty to let others who have changed our lives know the impact they have had on us.
Sue talks about how forensic anthropology is changing, about her work in identifying perpetrators of child sexual abuse and in war crimes investigations and about hope, optimism and how she maintains objectivity when faced with the effects of human cruelty.
“Even in the most awful situations,” she says, “you can find something that says humanity is better than this.”
Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/
Image credit: BBC.
Richard Horton is Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet.
He was born in London and is half Norwegian. He qualified in physiology and medicine from the University of Birmingham in 1986 and joined The Lancet in 1990, moving to New York as North American Editor in 1993.
Richard was the first President of the World Association of Medical Editors and he is a Past-President of the US Council of Science Editors. He has a strong interest in global health and medicine’s contribution to our wider culture. He now works to develop the idea of planetary health – the health of human civilizations and the ecosystems on which they depend.
In this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES, recorded before COVID-19, in a wide-ranging discussion Richard talks to Sam Guglani about his roots and formative experiences - and more recently his own illness - about the value of cooperative behaviour, about scientific publication, trust and politics, and the role of medicine as a global force for good.
In a statement that prefigures the current crisis Horton says: “Every successful species has been successful not because they have tried to compete with one another and tear each other apart, but because at profound moments of stress in their evolutionary history they have cooperated”.
Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer
Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/
Deborah Bowman is Professor of Ethics and Law at St George's, University of London. In this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES, Deborah talks to Sam Guglani about ethics, law and the tensions between them in the context of medical ethics and about her own experience of illness.
Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/
Kit de Waal has received numerous awards for her writing including the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize 2014 and 2015, the SI Leeds Literary Reader's Choice Prize 2014 and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Her first novel, 'My Name is Leon', was published in 2016 and shortlisted for the Costa Book Award. In this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES, Kit speaks with Sam Guglani about My Name is Leon and about childhood pain, loss, humanity and compassion, about 'embracing the grey' of right and wrong and about the role of literature and knowledge.
Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/
Richard Holloway was Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church. He is the award-winning author of On Forgiveness, Looking in the Distance, Godless Morality, Doubts and Loves, Between the Monster and the Saint and Leaving Alexandria.
In this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES, Richard speaks with Sam Guglani about ageing, his draw to and ambivalence around religion, the shared human capacity for cruelty, the vital duty towards kindness, and the possibility of hope.
Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. https://realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/
Sarah Perry is the award-winning author of three novels—After Me Comes the Flood, The Essex Serpent and Melmoth. Her work interrogates matters of faith, science and human suffering, and she is an extraordinary storyteller.
In this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES, Sarah speaks with Sam Guglani about her own encounter with illness and medicine, the value of fiction, the vagaries of moral judgment, and the presence of mystery in the pursuit of knowledge.
Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. https://realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/
Danny Dorling is a social geographer and is the Halford Mackinder Professorship in Geography in Oxford. He has studied and published extensively on issues concerning housing, health, employment, education and poverty. His collaborative work on the Worldmapper project has resulted in collection of world maps or ‘cartograms’, where territories are re-sized according to a subject of interest, for instance, inequality.
In this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES, Danny speaks with Sam Guglani about social inequality, personal and political responses to it, and its profound impact on the health and wellbeing of societies.
Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. https://realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/
Satish Kumar is an Indian British activist and editor. He has been a Jain monk, nuclear disarmament advocate, pacifist and is the current editor of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine.
Helen Jukes is a writer, writing tutor and beekeeper. Her writing has appeared in many publications, including Caught by the River, BBC Wildlife, Resurgence, the Junket and LITRO. She tutors on the creative writing programme at Oxford University, and also works with the Bee Friendly Trust, a London-based charity founded by beekeeper Luke Dixon to promote our understanding of honeybees and help nurture sustainable habitats.
Jason Barker is an actor and director, known for A Deal with the Universe (2018), Silly Girl (2016) and Boys on Film 18: Heroes (2018).
Mark G. Thomas is a human evolutionary geneticist, Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at the Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London.
Eley Williams is a British writer. Her debut collection of prose, Attrib. and Other Stories (Influx Press, 2017)was awarded the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize 2018. She teaches at Royal Holloway, University of London and supervises Jungftak, a journal for contemporary prose poetry.
Havi Carel is a professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol. Her research interests include philosophy of medicine, phenomenology, philosophy of death, epistemic injustice and health, illness, and children, and film and philosophy. Carel is best-known for her work on the phenomenology of somatic illness.
Daniel Trilling is a British journalist, editor and author. He is the editor of New Humanist magazine.
Raymond Tallis is a philosopher, poet, novelist, cultural critic and a retired medical physician and clinical neuroscientist.
Iona Heath was president of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) from 2009–2012.
Will Eaves is a novelist, poet and teacher. He was Arts Editor of the Times Literary Supplement and is Associate Professor in the Writing Programme at the University of Warwick.
Daniel Locke is an artist and graphic novelist.
His most recent graphic novel Out of Nothing, was published in November 2017 by Nobrow Press. Daniel’s work is featured in many anthologies of contemporary comics, and in 2016 his novella Pneuma was published in the USA by Tinto Press.
Tom de Freston is an artist based in Oxford. His practice is dedicated to the construction of multimedia worlds, combining paintings, film and performance into immersive visceral narratives.
John Danaher holds is a lecturer in law at NUI Galway (Ireland). His research interests are eclectic, ranging broadly from philosophy of religion to legal theory, with particular interests in human enhancement and neuroethics.
Jessie Greengrass published a collection of short stories called, An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It in 2015. It won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize.
Richard Holloway, FRSE is a Scottish writer, broadcaster and cleric. He was Bishop of Edinburgh from 1986 to 2000 and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church from 1992 to 2000.
Roger Kneebone directs the Imperial College Centre for Engagement and Simulation Science. The Centre's aim is to advance human health through simulation, collaborating closely with clinicans, scientsts, patients, publics and experts outside medicine.
Preti Taneja teaches writing in prisons and universities. Her novel We That Are Young (Galley Beggar) won the 2018 Desmond Elliot Prize for the year's best debut.
Zaffar Kunial is a British poet born in Birmingham, who currently lives in Shipley, Yorkshire. His mother was English and his father, who has since moved to Lahore, is from Kashmir.
Sarah Moss is an English writer & academic. She has published 6 novels as well as a number of non-fiction works and academic texts. Her work has been nominated three times for the Wellcome Book Prize.
Dr Elyan qualified in medicine from Bristol University and obtained further medical experience in the West Country. His oncology training was at Cambridge and Manchester where he did a research degree through the Paterson Institute and the Royal Marsden Hospital in London as a Senior Registrar.
Eley Williams is a British writer. Her debut collection of prose, Attrib. and Other Stories (Influx Press, 2017)was awarded the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize 2018. She teaches at Royal Holloway, University of London and supervises Jungftak, a journal for contemporary prose poetry.
Bruce Miller is a palliative care specialist at UCSF and executive director of San Francisco's Zen Hospice Project.
Max Porter is an English writer, formerly a bookseller and editor, best known for his critically acclaimed debut Grief is the Thing with Feathers. Prior to his writing career, Porter managed the Chelsea branch of Daunt Books and won the Bookseller of the Year Award in 2009. He was Editorial Director at Granta and Portobello Books until 2019.
Caspar Henderson is the author of 'The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary' which was shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science books and for which he received the Author’s Foundation Roger Deakin Award 2009 and The Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non Fiction 2009. His latest book, 'A New Map of Wonders: A Journey in Search of Marvels' will be published by Granta in November 2017.
He has been a journalist and editor with various publications and broadcasters. He is a past recipient of an IUCN-Reuters award for best environmental reporting in Western Europe. He has worked as a consultant and advisor with leading voluntary organisations, government and international agencies. He co authored 'Our Fragile Earth' (New Internationalist, 2005) and was the commissioning editor for 'Debating Globalization' (Polity, 2005).
Sarah Perry was born in Essex in 1979. She has a PhD in creative writing from Royal Holloway, and has been the Writer in Residence at the Gladstone Library and the UNESCO World City of Literature Writer in Residence in Prague. Her first novel, 'After Me Comes the Flood', was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Folio Prize, and won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award in 2014. Het second book, 'The Essex Serpent' was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2017, chosen as Waterstones Book of the Year 2016, awarded Book of the Year and Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards 2017 and longlisted for the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.
Medicine Unboxed 2018: MAPS. The world’s sheet, or its shroud, the lanes of a face etched in it. Or words, all of them, all knowledge, the found and lost truth of things, grid lines of metaphor, particles of us or is it waves? - rising and falling onto a brief shore of land. Measurements fail even now of your body, its contours and margin, where its meaning lies, our picture an opening of pure fractal, an unfolding view of coast. What is the unfathomable distance to another person, another place, the invisible track of starlings in murmuration, the wayward trail of your heartbeat on paper, its luck?
Laurence Rees is a former Head of BBC TV History Programmes.
For the last twenty-five years he written books and made documentaries about the Second World War and the Third Reich. His work includes 'Nazis: a Warning from History' (1997); 'War of the Century' (1999); 'Horror in the East' (2001); 'Auschwitz, the Nazis and the 'Final Solution'' (2005); 'World War Two: Behind Closed Doors' (2008) and 'The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler (2012)'. His ninety-minute feature length documentary, 'Touched by Auschwitz', transmitted on BBC2 in 2015.
His latest book, 'the Holocaust: A New History', was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and described as "the finest single volume account of the Holocaust" by The Daily Telegraph.
Liz Berry's debut collection, Black Country (Chatto & Windus, 2014), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, received a Somerset Maugham Award, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2014. Black Country was chosen as a book of the year by The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Mail, The Big Issue and The Morning Star. Liz’s poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio, television and recorded for the Poetry Archive. She has been a judge for major prizes including The Forward Prizes for Poetry and Foyle Young Poets. Liz works as a tutor for The Arvon Foundation, Writer’s Centre Norwich and Writing West Midlands. Mona Arshi is a poet and lawyer.
Her poem 'Hummingbird' won first prize in the Magma Magazine poetry competition in 2012. She also was one of the Competition winners for the World Events Young Artists Festival in September 2012. She was also an award winner in the Troubadour International Competition for her poem ‘Bad day in the Office’. In 2014, she was joint winner of the Manchester Creative Writing Competition. A portfolio of her poems appeared in TEN-THE NEW WAVE in 2014 by Bloodaxe books.
Mona’s poetry has been published widely in magazines including Poetry Review, Magma, Rialto and the Sunday Times.
Her début collection of poem ‘Small Hands’ was published by Liverpool University in 2015 and won the Forward Prize for best first collection.
Mona was one of ten poets selected for the ‘Complete Works’, a national development programme funded by the Arts Council.
Danny Dorling is the co-author of more than a dozen books on issues related to social inequalities in Britain and has published several hundred journal papers. His work concerns issues of housing, health, employment, education and poverty. Danny was employed as a play-worker in children’s summer play-schemes. He learnt the ethos of pre-school education where the underlying rationale was that playing is learning for living. He tries not to forget this. He is an Academician of the Academy of the Learned Societies in the Social Sciences, Honorary President of the Society of Cartographers and a patron of Roadpeace, the national charity for road crash victims.
Eimear McBride is the author of 'A Girl is a Half-formed Thing', her debut novel that won the 2013 Goldsmiths Prize, was shortlisted for the 2014 Folio Prize and won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2014. Her second book 'The Lesser Bohemians' was published in 2016.
Lara Pawson is the author of 'This Is The Place To Be', a fragmentary memoir which was published in September 2016 with CB editions. It is based on the long looping monologue, Non Correspondence, which was directed by Forced Entertainment’s Tim Etchells and performed by Cathy Naden at the Battersea Arts Centre for the London International Festival of Theatre 2014, After A War.
In the 'Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre' (IB Tauris, 2014) was her first book. It was nominated for several awards and longlisted for The Orwell Prize 2015. It was translated as 'Em Nome Do Povo: O massacre que Angola silenciou' (Ediçôes Tinta da China, 2014).
Her commentary, essays and reviews have been published in many places, most recently in the Times Literary Supplement, Verso, New Humanist and ArtReview. As well as making many programmes for the BBC, Lara has participated in numerous radio and television programmes in London, Lisbon, Luanda and Johannesburg.
Tim Dee was born in Liverpool in 1961. He has worked as a BBC radio producer for twenty years and divides his life between Bristol and Cambridge. He is the author of THE RUNNING SKY (2009) and FOUR FIELDS (2013). His new book, LANDFILL, will be published by Little Toller Books in early 2017.
The Guardian said about FOUR FIELDS: "An enthralling and unexpected book – or four short books – about what we have made of the natural world. The language itself is rich and loamy. There is evidence of much thought here, as well as a naturalist's profound observation. It is proof that really, there is no such thing as 'nature writing' – Dee gives us the wide world and everything in it, including ourselves and all our works."
Sara Wheeler is a British travel author and biographer, noted for her accounts of polar regions. Her writing includes the acclaimed ‘Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica’ and ‘The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic’.
Richard Horton is Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet. He qualified in physiology and medicine with honours from the University of Birmingham. Richard was the first President of the World Association of Medical Editors and he is a Past-President of the US Council of Science Editors. He is an honorary professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University College London, and the University of Oslo.
Kate Clanchy is the author of two prize-winning collections of poetry, 'Slattern' which won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) and a Somerset Maugham Award, and 'Samarkand', which was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Her poetry has been broadcast by BBC Radio and published in The Scotsman, the New Statesman and Poetry Review. She writes for radio and broadcasts on the World Service and BBC Radio 3 and 4. Her poetry collection 'Newborn' covers pregnancy, birth and caring for a new baby, and she wrote a poetic picture book for children, 'Our Cat Henry Comes to the Swings'. 'What Is She Doing Here?: A Refugee's Story' (2008) won the 2008 Writers' Guild Award (Best Book) and in 2013 her first novel 'Meeting the English' was published.
David Mitchell is the author of 'The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet', 'Black Swan Green', 'Cloud Atlas', 'Number9Dream', 'Ghostwritten', 'The Bone Clocks', 'Slade House' and the translation 'The Reason I Jump'. He was twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME magazine in 2007.
David Nott OBE FRCS has been a Consultant Surgeon at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for 23 years where he specialises in general surgery. David also performs vascular and trauma surgery at St Mary’s Hospital and cancer surgery at the Royal Marsden Hospital. David is an authority in laparoscopic surgery and was the first surgeon to combine laparoscopic and vascular surgery.
For the past twenty three years David has taken unpaid leave each year to work for the aid agencies Médecins Sans Frontières, the International Committee of the Red Cross and Syria Relief. He has provided surgical treatment to the victims of conflict and catastrophe in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Chad, Darfur, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Central African Republic, Gaza and Nepal.
In 2015 David established the David Nott Foundation with his wife Elly. The Foundation will support surgeons to develop their operating skills for warzones and austere environments.
Philip Marsden is an English travel writer and novelist. He was elected as a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature in 1996. He is a Trustee of the Royal Academy of Arts Development Trust.
Denise Riley is the author of the poetry collections 'Marxism for Infants', the volume 'No Fee' with Wendy Mulford, 'Dry Air', ' Stair Spirit', 'Mop Georgette', 'Selected Poems' and most recently 'Say Something Back', which was nominated for a Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection. Her chapbook, 'Time Lived, Without Its Flow' is a meditation on time after the sudden death of a child. A sequence of 20 short poems from the chapbook, titled 'A Part Song', was published in the London Review of Books and won a Forward Poetry Prize for Best Single Poem.
Medicine Unboxed 2016: WONDER explored how we wonder, what we wonder about, and what wonder compels us to in both an personal and planetary sense of duty.
Lynsey Hanley is the author of 'Estate: An intimate History' and 'Respectable: the experience of class'. She is a regular contributor to the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement.
Helen Pearson is a science journalist and editor for the international science journal Nature. She has been writing for Nature since 2001 and her stories have won accolades including the 2010 Wistar Institute Science Journalism Award and two best feature awards from the Association of British Science Writers. Based in London, she has a PhD in genetics and spent eight of her years with Nature in New York.
PhiL Hammond is a physician, broadcaster, comedian and commentator on health issues in the United Kingdom. He is best known for his humorous commentary on the National Health Service.
Robert Beckford is a British academic theologian and a professor in theology at Canterbury Christ Church University, whose documentaries for both the BBC and Channel 4 have caused debate among the Christian and British religious community.
Max Porter is a senior editor at Granta Books and Portobello Books. He previously managed an independent bookshop and won the Young Bookseller of the Year award. He lives in South London with his wife and children. he is the author of the novella 'Grief is the Thing with Feathers'.
Gavin Francis qualified in medicine from Edinburgh in 1999, then spent ten years travelling, visiting all seven continents. He is the author of three books: True North, Travels in Arctic Europe (2008, 2010), Empire Antarctica, Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins (2012) which was Scottish Book of the Year 2013 and shortlisted for the Costa, Ondaatje, Banff, & Saltire Prizes, & Adventures in Human Being (2015), which won Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2015. He lives and practises medicine in Edinburgh.
Jon Copley is Associate Professor of Marine Ecology at the University of Southampton, and the first British person to dive to a depth of five kilometres in the ocean. As a marine biologist, his research explores environments such as volcanic vents on the ocean floor, where his team and colleagues have discovered several new species of deep-sea creatures during recent expeditions. His work also involves teaching and writing, and he is co-founder of a company that trains scientists in how to share their research with wider public audiences.
Caspar Henderson is a writer and journalist. His work has appeared in the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Independent, New Scientist, the New York Review of Books. He received the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors in 2009 and the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award in 2010. He is the author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, a bestiary for the 21st Century, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science.
Michel Faber has written eight books, including the highly acclaimed The Book of Strange New Things, The Crimson Petal and the White, The Fahrenheit Twins and the Whitbread-shortlisted novel Under the Skin. The Apple, based on characters in The Crimson Petal and the White, was published in 2006. He has also written two novellas, The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps and The Courage Consort, and has won several short-story awards, including the Neil Gunn, Ian St James and Macallan. Born in Holland, brought up in Australia, he lives in the Scottish Highlands.
Sir Roger Penrose, Ph.D., OM, FRS is an English mathematical physicist and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College. He is renowned for his work in mathematical physics, in particular his contributions to general relativity and cosmology. He is also a recreational mathematician and philosopher.
Vahni Capildeo has published four poetry collections including Undraining Sea (2009), Dark & Unaccustomed Words (2012) – longlisted for the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature – Utter (2013) and Measures of Expatriation (2016).
Gaia Vince is a freelance British environmental journalist, broadcaster and non-fiction author who writes for The Guardian and BBC Online. She was previously news editor of Nature and online editor of New Scientist. Her book 'Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made' won the 2015 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, making her the first woman to win the prize outright.
Medicine Unboxed 2016: WONDER explored how we wonder, what we wonder about, and what wonder compels us to in both an personal and planetary sense of duty.
Medicine Unboxed 2016: WONDER explored how we wonder, what we wonder about, and what wonder compels us to in both an personal and planetary sense of duty.
Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. He is Editor and Co-Author of 30 Second Brain (Ivy Press, 2014), Consultant for Eye Benders (Ivy Press, 2013; winner of the Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize 2014) and contributes regularly to a variety of media including the New Scientist, The Guardian, and the BBC. Anil writes the popular blog NeuroBanter.
Paul Fletcher is Bernard Wolfe Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. His research explores psychosis using combined functional neuroimaging and pharmacological experiments.
In March 2010, James Rhodes became the first core classical pianist to be signed to the world’s largest rock label Warner Bros Records. His 1st album with Warner Bros, “Bullets & Lullabies” became his 3rd No1 iTunes album. That summer he was also the first solo classical pianist to play the Latitude Festival sharing stages with international stars such as Florence + the Machine and The National.
Medicine Unboxed 2016: WONDER explored how we wonder, what we wonder about, and what wonder compels us to in both an personal and planetary sense of duty.
David Nicholl is a neurologist, human rights activist, fundraiser for Amnesty International, and online columnist from Belfast, Northern Ireland. In March 2006 he initiated a letter in the medical journal The Lancet, signed by more than 250 medical experts urging the United States to stop force-feeding at the Guantanamo Bay and close down the prison camp.
Medicine Unboxed 2015 MORTALITY looked at life and death and the lines that separate them.
We will marvel at how molecules are arranged into life and examine other beginnings and endings, of the universe and how all nature folds and unfolds in time. We will wonder about time. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, in our homes and fields. We will see medicine’s hand raised against death and suffering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We will ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural differences in the experience of death, how immortality is conceived in mythology and sought in technology, our pursuit of the afterlife, and how fact and imagination meet in our encounter with death.
Medicine Unboxed 2015 MORTALITY looked at life and death and the lines that separate them.
We will marvel at how molecules are arranged into life and examine other beginnings and endings, of the universe and how all nature folds and unfolds in time. We will wonder about time. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, in our homes and fields. We will see medicine’s hand raised against death and suffering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We will ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural differences in the experience of death, how immortality is conceived in mythology and sought in technology, our pursuit of the afterlife, and how fact and imagination meet in our encounter with death.
Medicine Unboxed 2015 MORTALITY looked at life and death and the lines that separate them.
We will marvel at how molecules are arranged into life and examine other beginnings and endings, of the universe and how all nature folds and unfolds in time. We will wonder about time. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, in our homes and fields. We will see medicine’s hand raised against death and suffering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We will ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural differences in the experience of death, how immortality is conceived in mythology and sought in technology, our pursuit of the afterlife, and how fact and imagination meet in our encounter with death.
Medicine Unboxed 2015 MORTALITY looked at life and death and the lines that separate them.
We will marvel at how molecules are arranged into life and examine other beginnings and endings, of the universe and how all nature folds and unfolds in time. We will wonder about time. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, in our homes and fields. We will see medicine’s hand raised against death and suffering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We will ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural differences in the experience of death, how immortality is conceived in mythology and sought in technology, our pursuit of the afterlife, and how fact and imagination meet in our encounter with death.
Medicine Unboxed 2015 MORTALITY looked at life and death and the lines that separate them.
We will marvel at how molecules are arranged into life and examine other beginnings and endings, of the universe and how all nature folds and unfolds in time. We will wonder about time. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, in our homes and fields. We will see medicine’s hand raised against death and suffering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We will ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural differences in the experience of death, how immortality is conceived in mythology and sought in technology, our pursuit of the afterlife, and how fact and imagination meet in our encounter with death.
Medicine Unboxed 2015 MORTALITY looked at life and death and the lines that separate them.
We will marvel at how molecules are arranged into life and examine other beginnings and endings, of the universe and how all nature folds and unfolds in time. We will wonder about time. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, in our homes and fields. We will see medicine’s hand raised against death and suffering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We will ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural differences in the experience of death, how immortality is conceived in mythology and sought in technology, our pursuit of the afterlife, and how fact and imagination meet in our encounter with death.
Medicine Unboxed 2015 MORTALITY looked at life and death and the lines that separate them.
We will marvel at how molecules are arranged into life and examine other beginnings and endings, of the universe and how all nature folds and unfolds in time. We will wonder about time. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, in our homes and fields. We will see medicine’s hand raised against death and suffering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We will ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural differences in the experience of death, how immortality is conceived in mythology and sought in technology, our pursuit of the afterlife, and how fact and imagination meet in our encounter with death.
Medicine Unboxed 2015 MORTALITY looked at life and death and the lines that separate them.
We will marvel at how molecules are arranged into life and examine other beginnings and endings, of the universe and how all nature folds and unfolds in time. We will wonder about time. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, in our homes and fields. We will see medicine’s hand raised against death and suffering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We will ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural differences in the experience of death, how immortality is conceived in mythology and sought in technology, our pursuit of the afterlife, and how fact and imagination meet in our encounter with death.
Medicine Unboxed 2015 MORTALITY looked at life and death and the lines that separate them.
We will marvel at how molecules are arranged into life and examine other beginnings and endings, of the universe and how all nature folds and unfolds in time. We will wonder about time. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, in our homes and fields. We will see medicine’s hand raised against death and suffering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We will ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural differences in the experience of death, how immortality is conceived in mythology and sought in technology, our pursuit of the afterlife, and how fact and imagination meet in our encounter with death.
Medicine Unboxed 2015 MORTALITY looked at life and death and the lines that separate them.
We will marvel at how molecules are arranged into life and examine other beginnings and endings, of the universe and how all nature folds and unfolds in time. We will wonder about time. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, in our homes and fields. We will see medicine’s hand raised against death and suffering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We will ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural differences in the experience of death, how immortality is conceived in mythology and sought in technology, our pursuit of the afterlife, and how fact and imagination meet in our encounter with death.
Henry Marsh is am English neurosurgeon, and a pioneer of neurosurgical advances in Ukraine. His widely acclaimed memoir Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery was published in 2014.
Sue Margaret Black is a Scottish forensic anthropologist, anatomist and academic. She is the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Engagement at Lancaster University and current President of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.
Medicine Unboxed 2015 MORTALITY looked at life and death and the lines that separate them.
We will marvel at how molecules are arranged into life and examine other beginnings and endings, of the universe and how all nature folds and unfolds in time. We will wonder about time. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, in our homes and fields. We will see medicine’s hand raised against death and suffering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We will ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural differences in the experience of death, how immortality is conceived in mythology and sought in technology, our pursuit of the afterlife, and how fact and imagination meet in our encounter with death.
Medicine Unboxed 2015 MORTALITY looked at life and death and the lines that separate them.
We will marvel at how molecules are arranged into life and examine other beginnings and endings, of the universe and how all nature folds and unfolds in time. We will wonder about time. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, in our homes and fields. We will see medicine’s hand raised against death and suffering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We will ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural differences in the experience of death, how immortality is conceived in mythology and sought in technology, our pursuit of the afterlife, and how fact and imagination meet in our encounter with death.
Performed Voice: Ballistic Buns is a brief fragment of Bobby Baker's research into her own family history focusing on mental illness, family survival techniques and the impact of war, unhappiness and frustrated ambition on subsequent generations.
This 10-minute piece involved tales of the Vicar of Byker, the Ballistic Engineer, the Life Long Anorexic, the 16” German Howitzer named affectionately 'Big Bertha', capable of blasting plenty of folk to smithereens in the First World War, the Dambusters of the Second World War and a Tasty Ending.
Bobby Baker is a woman, and an artist. She lives in London. In a career spanning nearly four decades she has, amongst other things, made a life-sized edible version of her family and driven around the streets of London strapped to the back of a truck yelling at passers by through a megaphone to ‘Pull Yourselves Together.’
Baker’s touring exhibition Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me 1997- 2008 premiered at the Wellcome Collection in 2009, and the accompanying book of the same name won the Mind Book of the Year 2011. Her most recent live show, Mad Gyms & Kitchens, was commissioned as part of the London 2012 Unlimited project for the Cultural Olympiad.
Baker is a past recipient of three separate Wellcome Arts Awards, and occupies a unique professional and personal position in the worlds of both the arts and mental health. Following an AHRC Creative Fellowship at Queen Mary University, London she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in 2011.
Bobby Baker is the Artistic Director of Daily Life Ltd, part of the Arts Council National Portfolio.
Performed Voice : Bobby Baker is a woman, and an artist. She lives in London. In a career spanning nearly four decades she has, amongst other things, made a life-sized edible version of her family and driven around the streets of London strapped to the back of a truck yelling at passers by through a megaphone to ‘Pull Yourselves Together.’
Baker’s touring exhibition Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me 1997- 2008 premiered at the Wellcome Collection in 2009, and the accompanying book of the same name won the Mind Book of the Year 2011. Her most recent live show, Mad Gyms & Kitchens, was commissioned as part of the London 2012 Unlimited project for the Cultural Olympiad.
Baker is a past recipient of three separate Wellcome Arts Awards, and occupies a unique professional and personal position in the worlds of both the arts and mental health. Following an AHRC Creative Fellowship at Queen Mary University, London she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in 2011.
Bobby Baker is the Artistic Director of Daily Life Ltd, part of the Arts Council National Portfolio.
Performed Voice: Ballistic Buns is a brief fragment of Bobby Baker's research into her own family history focusing on mental illness, family survival techniques and the impact of war, unhappiness and frustrated ambition on subsequent generations.
This 10-minute piece involved tales of the Vicar of Byker, the Ballistic Engineer, the Life Long Anorexic, the 16” German Howitzer named affectionately 'Big Bertha', capable of blasting plenty of folk to smithereens in the First World War, the Dambusters of the Second World War and a Tasty Ending.
Bobby Baker is a woman, and an artist. She lives in London. In a career spanning nearly four decades she has, amongst other things, made a life-sized edible version of her family and driven around the streets of London strapped to the back of a truck yelling at passers by through a megaphone to ‘Pull Yourselves Together.’
Baker’s touring exhibition Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me 1997- 2008 premiered at the Wellcome Collection in 2009, and the accompanying book of the same name won the Mind Book of the Year 2011. Her most recent live show, Mad Gyms & Kitchens, was commissioned as part of the London 2012 Unlimited project for the Cultural Olympiad.
Baker is a past recipient of three separate Wellcome Arts Awards, and occupies a unique professional and personal position in the worlds of both the arts and mental health. Following an AHRC Creative Fellowship at Queen Mary University, London she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in 2011.
Bobby Baker is the Artistic Director of Daily Life Ltd, part of the Arts Council National Portfolio.
Philip Hoare (born 1958, Southampton) is the author of six works of non-fiction: Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant (1990) and Noel Coward: A Biography (1995), Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the First World War (1997), Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital (2000), and England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia (2005). Leviathan or, The Whale (2008), won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction.
An experienced broadcaster, Hoare wrote and presented the BBC Arena film The Hunt for Moby-Dick, and directed three films for BBC’s Whale Night. He is Visiting Fellow at Southampton University, and Leverhulme Artist-in-residence at The Marine Institute, Plymouth University, which awarded him an honourary doctorate in 2011.
He is also co-curator, with Angela Cockayne, of the Moby-Dick Big Read, www.mobydickbigread.com
Camila Batmanghelidjh CBE is an Iranian-born British charity executive and author. She is best known as the founder of Kids Company, a charity which worked with inner-city children and young people in the UK.
Philip Gross was born in 1952 in Cornwall, and grew up in Plymouth. With a Cornish mother and an Estonian father, Gross has emerged as one of the greatest poetic voices of displacement, conveying what Terry Eagleton views as “lost bearings and blurred frontiers” (Independent on Sunday). He won an Eric Gregory Award in 1981 and, in the following year, won the National Poetry Competition. He was recently awarded the TS Eliot Prize for his collection The Water Table (Bloodaxe, 2009). His other collections for adults include Familiars (Peterloo, 1983), The Ice Factory (Faber, 1984), Cat’s Whisker (Faber, 1987), The Son of the Duke of Nowhere (Faber, 1991), I.D. (Faber, 1994), The Wasting Game (Bloodaxe, 1998), Changes of Address: Poems 1980-1998 (Bloodaxe, 2001), Mappa Mundi (Bloodaxe, 2003) and The Egg of Zero (Bloodaxe, 2006).
Daljit Nagra was born and brought up in West London and Sheffield. In 2003, he won the Smith/Doorstop pamphlet competition with Oh my Rub!, under the pseudonym Khan Singh Kumar, the pamphlet going on to become a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice and chosen as one of The Guardian's Poetry Books of the Year. In 2004, his poem Look We Have Coming to Dover! won the Forward Prize (Best Single Poem), and this became the title of his first collection, published in 2007. It went on to win the 2007 Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) and the 2008 Arts Council England Decibel Award. It relates to the experience of British-born Indians, and often employs 'Punglish' - English spoken by Indian Punjabi immigrants. Look We Have Coming to Dover! was shortlisted for several further awards, including the 2007 Costa Poetry Award, and the 2007 Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. Daljit Nagra's second collection, Tipoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!!, its title inspired by an 18th-century automaton, was published in 2011. It was shortlisted for the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize.
Yasmin Gunaratnam teaches in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths College and is member of the Media Diversfied collective. Her latest book Death & the Migrant (Bloomsbury Academic) is about transnational dying in British cities.
Iona Heath worked as an inner city general practitioner at the Caversham Group Practice in Kentish Town in London from 1975 until 2010. She was a nationally elected member of the Council of the Royal College of General Practitioners 1989 to 2009 and chaired the College’s Committee on Medical Ethics from 1998 to 2004 and the International Committee from 2006 to 2009. She has been a member of the Wonca World Executive since 1997. In November 2009, she was elected as President of the Royal College of General Practitioners for a three year term. She has written regularly for the British Medical Journal in her personal capacity. Her book ‘Matters of Life and Death’ was published in 2007.
Camila Batmanghelidjh CBE is an Iranian-born British charity executive and author. She is best known as the founder of Kids Company, a charity which worked with inner-city children and young people in the UK.
Iona Heath worked as an inner city general practitioner at the Caversham Group Practice in Kentish Town in London from 1975 until 2010. She was a nationally elected member of the Council of the Royal College of General Practitioners 1989 to 2009 and chaired the College’s Committee on Medical Ethics from 1998 to 2004 and the International Committee from 2006 to 2009. She has been a member of the Wonca World Executive since 1997. In November 2009, she was elected as President of the Royal College of General Practitioners for a three year term. She has written regularly for the British Medical Journal in her personal capacity. Her book ‘Matters of Life and Death’ was published in 2007.
An artist trained in special effects prosthetics, Sophie de Oliveira Barata recognizes the creative, self-expressive possibilities that artificial limbs hold. After nearly a decade of working for medical prosthetic providers, Sophie founded the Alternative Limb Project in 2011. Her studio offers a bespoke service to amputees that either allows their prostheses to blend in with their bodies, or stand out as unique pieces of art that reflects the wearer’s imagination, personality, and interests. Some of Sophie’s out-of-the-box creations include a leg with an embedded stereo, another with removable muscles, and a third that houses mini-drawers.
Sarah Moss, Gabriel Weston and Shaun Elyan in conversation with Sam Guglani at Medicine Unboxed 2014.
Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist and writer who practised in London, but now lives on the Isle of Skye, where he continues to write and make a living by lecturing.
He is committed to the idea that the mind and brain can be understood only by seeing them in the broadest possible context, that of the whole of our physical and spiritual existence, and of the wider human culture in which they arise – the culture which helps to mould, and in turn is moulded by, our minds and brains.
William Fiennes, John Carey, Bob Heath, Ray Tallis and Christopher Potter in discussion with Sam Guglani.
MELANIE PAPPENHEIM has devised work with many leading multimedia groups such as Lumiere & Son, DV8 Physical Theatre (Strange Fish) and The Shout, of which she is a founder member. Melanie can be heard on TV and film soundtracks including Derek Jarman's Edward II and The Garden and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York.
REBECCA ASKEW
is a performer and songwriter. She studied jazz at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She has been a member of The Shout, the award-winning 16 piece vocal band, since 1999 and has contributed pieces to their repertoire. She is a regular soloist with the Voice Project in Norwich and has performed with them new work by Gwiliym Simcock, Arve Henrikson, Jan Bang, Nik Bartsch, Karen Wimhurst and Jon Baker. They also recently undertook the Artist Development Scheme at Snape Maltings.
JOCELYN POOK is an award-winning British composer who has performed with artists including Peter Gabriel, Laurie Anderson, Mark Knopfler, 3 Mustaphas 3, PJ Harvey and as a member of the Communards. She has released several albums including Deluge (1997), Flood (1999) and Untold Things (2003). Jocelyn’s score for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut received a Chicago Film Award and a Golden Globe nomination.
ANDREW MOTION poet, novelist, and biographer, was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009 and was knighted in 2009. He founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work, and the Poetry By Heart competition for school children. Andrew has won the Arvon Prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Eric Gregory Award, Whitbread Prize for Biography and the Dylan Thomas Prize.
MELANIE PAPPENHEIM has devised work with many leading multimedia groups such as Lumiere & Son, DV8 Physical Theatre (Strange Fish) and The Shout, of which she is a founder member. Melanie can be heard on TV and film soundtracks including Derek Jarman's Edward II and The Garden and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York.
REBECCA ASKEW
is a performer and songwriter. She studied jazz at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She has been a member of The Shout, the award-winning 16 piece vocal band, since 1999 and has contributed pieces to their repertoire. She is a regular soloist with the Voice Project in Norwich and has performed with them new work by Gwiliym Simcock, Arve Henrikson, Jan Bang, Nik Bartsch, Karen Wimhurst and Jon Baker. They also recently undertook the Artist Development Scheme at Snape Maltings.
BOB HEATH has been the music therapist at Sobell House Hospice in Oxford since 2004 and also lectures in music therapy at the University of the West of England. He runs a range of training courses for music therapists and health care practitioners including a number of Creative Songwriting courses with colleague Jane Lings. He continues to pursue his interest in other music therapy contexts and works regularly in community mental health and learning disability settings.
BOB HEATH has been the music therapist at Sobell House Hospice in Oxford since 2004 and also lectures in music therapy at the University of the West of England. He runs a range of training courses for music therapists and health care practitioners including a number of Creative Songwriting courses with colleague Jane Lings. He continues to pursue his interest in other music therapy contexts and works regularly in community mental health and learning disability settings.
EDUARDO MIRANDA is a composer working at the crossroads of music and science, whose music is informed and inspired by his research into Artificial Intelligence. In 2011-2012 he was composer-in-residence at the Science Museum, London, working with Lottolab Studio. He has composed music for symphonic orchestras, chamber groups, solo instruments - with and without live electronics - and electroacoustic music. Eduardo’s music has been broadcast and performed at festivals and concerts worldwide.
EDUARDO MIRANDA is a composer working at the crossroads of music and science, whose music is informed and inspired by his research into Artificial Intelligence. In 2011-2012 he was composer-in-residence at the Science Museum, London, working with Lottolab Studio. He has composed music for symphonic orchestras, chamber groups, solo instruments - with and without live electronics - and electroacoustic music. Eduardo’s music has been broadcast and performed at festivals and concerts worldwide.
EDUARDO MIRANDA is a composer working at the crossroads of music and science, whose music is informed and inspired by his research into Artificial Intelligence. In 2011-2012 he was composer-in-residence at the Science Museum, London, working with Lottolab Studio. He has composed music for symphonic orchestras, chamber groups, solo instruments - with and without live electronics - and electroacoustic music. Eduardo’s music has been broadcast and performed at festivals and concerts worldwide.
ROGER KNEEBONE, former surgeon and GP, is now Professor of Surgical Education at Imperial College London where he explores the synergies between clinical care, biomedical science, art, humanities and performance through a collaboration between clinicians, educationalists, computer scientists, psychologists, social scientists, design engineers and experts from the visual and performing arts.
ROGER KNEEBONE, former surgeon and GP, is now Professor of Surgical Education at Imperial College London where he explores the synergies between clinical care, biomedical science, art, humanities and performance through a collaboration between clinicians, educationalists, computer scientists, psychologists, social scientists, design engineers and experts from the visual and performing arts.
ROGER KNEEBONE, former surgeon and GP, is now Professor of Surgical Education at Imperial College London where he explores the synergies between clinical care, biomedical science, art, humanities and performance through a collaboration between clinicians, educationalists, computer scientists, psychologists, social scientists, design engineers and experts from the visual and performing arts.
FI GLOVER, ranked amongst the top ten British voices in a poll conducted by Radio Times, is a Sony award-winning broadcaster who has worked on BBC’s The Breakfast Show, Broadcasting House and Saturday Live, and for GLR and 5 Live, and was chair of judges for the Orange prize for fiction in 2009. She presents The Listening Project, a partnership between BBC Radio 4, BBC local and national radio stations, and the British Library that captures the nation in conversation.
FI GLOVER, ranked amongst the top ten British voices in a poll conducted by Radio Times, is a Sony award-winning broadcaster who has worked on BBC’s The Breakfast Show, Broadcasting House and Saturday Live, and for GLR and 5 Live, and was chair of judges for the Orange prize for fiction in 2009. She presents The Listening Project, a partnership between BBC Radio 4, BBC local and national radio stations, and the British Library that captures the nation in conversation.
JO SHAPCOTT, poet, has won a number of literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Collection, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the National Poetry Competition. Her most recent collection, Of Mutability, was published in 2010 and won the Costa Book Award. In 2011 Jo Shapcott was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Jo is patron of Medicine Unboxed.
JO SHAPCOTT, poet, has won a number of literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Collection, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the National Poetry Competition. Her most recent collection, Of Mutability, was published in 2010 and won the Costa Book Award. In 2011 Jo Shapcott was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Jo is patron of Medicine Unboxed.
JO SHAPCOTT, poet, has won a number of literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Collection, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the National Poetry Competition. Her most recent collection, Of Mutability, was published in 2010 and won the Costa Book Award. In 2011 Jo Shapcott was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Jo is patron of Medicine Unboxed.
Lionel Shriver talks to Sam Guglani at Medicine Unboxed 2013: Voice.
Lionel Shriver's novels include The New Republic, So Much for That, The Post-Birthday World, and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin. Her journalism has appeared in The Guardian, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.
My Voice: Rhys Morgan is a consumer watchdog, science activist, and health blogger from Wales who first received acclaim in 2010 when, at the age of 15, he played a key role in raising awareness of the health risks of Miracle Mineral Supplement.
Mark Waters, Sean Elyan and Sam Guglani contribute to the 'Your Voice' theme of Medicine Unboxed 2013.
The Engaged Voice - Raymond Tallis, Roger Taylor and Allyson Pollock at Medicine Unboxed 2013.
Sir Andrew Motion, FRSL is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009.
BOB HEATH has been the music therapist at Sobell House Hospice in Oxford since 2004 and also lectures in music therapy at the University of the West of England. He runs a range of training courses for music therapists and health care practitioners including a number of Creative Songwriting courses with colleague Jane Lings. He continues to pursue his interest in other music therapy contexts and works regularly in community mental health and learning disability settings.
Eduardo Miranda is a Brazilian composer of chamber and electroacoustic pieces but is most notable in the United Kingdom for his scientific research into computer music, particularly in the field of human-machine interfaces where brain waves will replace keyboards and voice commands to permit the disabled to express themselves musically.
Hidden Voice - Stephen Grosz in conversation with Sam Guglani.
Stephen Grosz is a practicing psychoanalyst—he has worked with patients for more than twenty-five years. Born in America, educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Oxford University, he teaches at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London. He lives in London.
Professor Raymond Tallis is a philosopher, poet, novelist and cultural critic and was until recently a physician and clinical scientist. In the Economist's Intelligent Life Magazine (Autumn 2009) he was listed as one of the top living polymaths in the world.
Surgical Voice - Roger Kneebone At Medicine Unboxed 2013. Roger Kneebone trained first as a general and trauma surgeon, working both in the UK and in Southern Africa. After finishing his specialist training, he decided to become a general practitioner and joined a large group practice in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. In the 1990s he pioneered an innovative national training programme for minor surgery within primary care, based around intensive workshops using simulated tissue models and a computer-based learning program. In 2003, Roger left his practice to join Imperial College London.
Much of Roger’s current research focuses on simulation. He leads an unorthodox and creative research group, bringing together clinicians, educationalists, computer scientists, psychologists, social scientists, design engineers and experts from the visual and performing arts. Current themes include Hybrid Simulation (the combination of professional actors with inanimate models to create realistic clinical encounters) and Distributed Simulation (low-cost, portable yet highly convincing environments such as the ‘inflatable operating theatre’). Roger has recently been exploring how simulation can be used to recreate tacit and embodied surgical practices from the recent past. Roger holds grants from the EPSRC, ESRC, AHRC, Wellcome Trust and London Deanery. He has a wide range of professional interests and is especially interested in collaborative research at the intersections between traditional disciplinary boundaries. Current work is exploring synergies between clinical care, biomedical science, art, humanities and performance.
Roger leads the UK’s only Masters in Education (MEd) in Surgical Education, which started in October 2005. This challenging programme builds on educational theory and practice to explore relationships between the biomedical sciences, the craft of surgery and the humanities and social sciences.
MELANIE PAPPENHEIM has devised work with many leading multimedia groups such as Lumiere & Son, DV8 Physical Theatre (Strange Fish) and The Shout, of which she is a founder member. Melanie can be heard on TV and film soundtracks including Derek Jarman's Edward II and The Garden and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York.
REBECCA ASKEW
is a performer and songwriter. She studied jazz at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She has been a member of The Shout, the award-winning 16 piece vocal band, since 1999 and has contributed pieces to their repertoire. She is a regular soloist with the Voice Project in Norwich and has performed with them new work by Gwiliym Simcock, Arve Henrikson, Jan Bang, Nik Bartsch, Karen Wimhurst and Jon Baker. They also recently undertook the Artist Development Scheme at Snape Maltings.
JACKIE KAY was an adopted child of Scottish/Nigerian descent brought up by white parents in Glasgow, a heritage she explored in Red Dust Road, an account of her search for her natural parents. She is one of Britain’s best-known poets, appearing frequently on radio and TV programmes on poetry and culture. She has won the Signal Poetry Award, the Guardian Fiction Prize and was the British Book Awards Decibel Writer of the Year for her collection of short stories Wish I Was Here.
JACKIE KAY was an adopted child of Scottish/Nigerian descent brought up by white parents in Glasgow, a heritage she explored in Red Dust Road, an account of her search for her natural parents. She is one of Britain’s best-known poets, appearing frequently on radio and TV programmes on poetry and culture. She has won the Signal Poetry Award, the Guardian Fiction Prize and was the British Book Awards Decibel Writer of the Year for her collection of short stories Wish I Was Here.
JOCELYN POOK is an award-winning British composer who has performed with artists including Peter Gabriel, Laurie Anderson, Mark Knopfler, 3 Mustaphas 3, PJ Harvey and as a member of the Communards. She has released several albums including Deluge (1997), Flood (1999) and Untold Things (2003). Jocelyn’s score for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut received a Chicago Film Award and a Golden Globe nomination.
MELANIE PAPPENHEIM has devised work with many leading multimedia groups such as Lumiere & Son, DV8 Physical Theatre (Strange Fish) and The Shout, of which she is a founder member. Melanie can be heard on TV and film soundtracks including Derek Jarman's Edward II and The Garden and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York.
REBECCA ASKEW
is a performer and songwriter. She studied jazz at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She has been a member of The Shout, the award-winning 16 piece vocal band, since 1999 and has contributed pieces to their repertoire. She is a regular soloist with the Voice Project in Norwich and has performed with them new work by Gwiliym Simcock, Arve Henrikson, Jan Bang, Nik Bartsch, Karen Wimhurst and Jon Baker. They also recently undertook the Artist Development Scheme at Snape Maltings.
FI GLOVER, ranked amongst the top ten British voices in a poll conducted by Radio Times, is a Sony award-winning broadcaster who has worked on BBC’s The Breakfast Show, Broadcasting House and Saturday Live, and for GLR and 5 Live, and was chair of judges for the Orange prize for fiction in 2009. She presents The Listening Project, a partnership between BBC Radio 4, BBC local and national radio stations, and the British Library that captures the nation in conversation.
Sam Guglani in discussion with Colin Leys, Richard Horton, Clare Short and Matthew Flinders on the HNS, equality, health and the broader social determinants of health that may go unaddressed. Have the values that created the NHS changed, and are we handing over the NHS to organisations that are, in Colin Leys' words "not dedicated to community interests but to shareholder interests"?
Ray Tallis and Rupert Sheldrake discuss the limitations of reason, the dogma of science and the evolution of knowledge in medicine.
What is the imagination for? Sam Guglani and Jo Shapcott explore cracks in the edifice of reason, and what new ways we can understand the imagination. Jo draws on her experience of her own illness and how the imagination works with a diagnosis of serious illness - her "cellular imagination".
Questions for Ray Tallis and Rupert Sheldrake from the audience, focusing on phenomenology, postmodernism, complementary medicine and biomedical discourse and the role of scientific evidence in medicine.
Rupert Sheldrake, author of 'The Science Delusion', talks about scientism, the conflict between science as a belief system and science as method of enquiry, and the 10 dogmas of modern science. Rupert challenges us to question our beliefs about the scientific worldview - and what might result if we did.
In one of the more unlikely conversations at Medicine Unboxed 2012, Rupert Sheldrake and Ray Tallis discuss science, canine intuition, and coming out.
Adam Kay choruses Medicine Unboxed on anaesthetists and the machine that goes beep, the perils of smoking, the downside of stammering and Iranian Men.
Jo Shapcott talks about Medicine Unboxed: "Extraordinarily, extraordinary. Like a university education up to PhD level in one-and-a-half days".
Questions on how to improve patient communication, listening to the authentic voice of patients, and realising and clarifying the goals of medicine.
Sam Guglani talks to Ray Tallis, Iona Health, Gabriel Scally and Sean Elyan about how medicine is communicated, the hiatus of understanding of the patient context and the erosion of trust in medicine and medical professionals.
The Medicine Unboxed 2012 closing session on Communicating with the Public with contributions from Ray Tallis, Iona Health, Gabriel Scally and Sean Elyan.
Questions for Colin Leys, Clare Short, Richard Horton and Matthew Flinders on the need for time in health, the collection and use of information, the market-led NHS, the medical media and how to take effective action in the public sector.
Richard Horton, Colin Leys, Clare Short and Matthew Flinders deliver short position statements on health and justice at Medicine Unboxed 2012.
From the starting point that the 21st century will be defined by the management of public expectations, Professor Matthew Flinders argues that some parts of society have become democratically decadent - better at expressing their rights rather than demonstrating their responsibilities. He invites us to step into the arena and make a difference - rather than heckling from the sidelines.
"We are all patients - open to being coerced, and uncertain in a position of vulnerability" says Sam Guglani, closing the first day of Medicine Unboxed 2012.
'Doctor' Adam Kay teaches us how to successfully set up in private practice avoiding extensive medical training, student loans and expensive medical equipment.
Questions from the Medicine Unboxed audience for Sebastian Faulks on lies and fiction in the medical encounter, his account of mental illness in 'Human Traces', the character of Stephen in 'Birdsong' and narrative and storytelling in consultation.
Sam Guglani interviews novelist, journalist and broadcaster Sebastian Faulks, author of The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Birdsong, and Charlotte Gray.
Questions from the Medicine Unboxed 2012 audience for Rhidian Brook and Richard Holloway on religious conviction and patient care, the nature of truth and hope, and the role of 'consoling fiction' in managing conversations about death.
Rhidian Brook and Richard Holloway discuss faith, uncertainty, dogma, science and theology with Sam Guglani at Medicine Unboxed 2012.
Adam Kay performs 'I Know Hymns So Well', 'OCD', 'My Gordon Brown-Eyed Girl', 'Ain't No Sunshine', 'The Girl with Emphysema', 'The Son of a Pizza Man' and 'A Lot Like Jesus'.
Questions from the audience for Richard Horton, Iona Heath and Jane Macnaughton on the role of health economics, medical science, the question of valid knowledge in medicine and the nature of communication between doctor and patient.
Questions for Charles Fernyhough and Tim Parks from the Medicine Unboxed audience - on alternative medicine, Christianity and role of the physical, spiritual and emotional in mental illness.
Richard Horton, Iona Heath and Jane Macnaughton discuss the interface between patient and healthcare professionals and the way that insight and technical facts play out in the consultation.
Charles Fernyhough and Tim Parks in discussion on materialism, experience and the existential phenomenon that - in Tim's words - dogs live in a world of pleasure beyond anything we know.
"I am my body. I am not my body." So begins Tim Parks at Medicine Unboxed 2012 on his experience of illness, treatment and medicine and his experience of mortal life.
Charles Fernyhough on the 'rush to the neuro' in the popular press, can neuroscience can explain the human experience, if there is such a thing as neurotruth - and how it might affect the way we see ourselves.
Questions from the audience for Jo Shapcott: should imagination be prescribed, metaphor and the collective imagination, empathy and imagination as core clinical values, the roll of poetry in medical education and why hypotheses don't arrive from heaven.
John Burnside talks to Sam Guglani and Jo Shapcott about metaphor and imagination and its force in the world. We hear John reads his poem "First Signs of Ageing" via Soundcloud.