Cutting-edge TV

The BBC is showing an admirable commitment to medical history. Last year, there was a 30-part series, The Making of Modern Medicine, on Radio 4, doing for medicine what This Sceptred Isle did for the history of Britain. Last night, a new series started on BBC4: ‘Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery’. First up was a look at brain surgery.

The programme, presented by the engaging Michael Mosley, didn’t attempt to be exhaustive. It featured a few personal stories, mercifully sparing us from the ‘reconstructed by actors’ scenes that blight so many documentaries these days. I’m not usually squeamish, but Mosley demonstrating a transorbital lobotomy (basically hammering an icepick through the eye socket and rummaging about in the brain) was a ‘look away now’ moment. The well-meaning proselytiser of this hit-and-miss technique, Walter Freeman, travelled America in a camper van, lobotomising as he went. Even his son, who was interviewed, thought it ghastly.

Mosley tracked down one of Freeman’s victims, Howard, who at only 12 had been handed over for surgery by his evil stepmother. Howard gamely agreed to have an MRI scan – apparently the first to be performed on anyone with a transorbital lobotomy. ‘I feel so privileged to be here,’ gushed Mosley, momentarily conflating the act of looking at a map with the taking of the trip. There were two ominous lacunae in the parts of his brain associated with impulse control. Howard looked bemused at being told by Mosely what a fantastic individual he was. It’s like being told you’ve been improved by having a hole in the head.

Noevertheless, the minor irritation of Mosely’s sycophancy aside, this is riveting TV. It’s a risky business being a documentary presenter these days. You’re expected, Blue Peter style, to proffer yourself up as an experimental subject. Mosely had his brain electricity interfered with to demonstrate brain geography. It will be interesting to see if he survives the six-week series undamaged by modern medicine.

Meanwhile, Lord Winston takes to the screen again tonight in Superdoctors on BBC1 at 9 pm. This three-parter looks at frontier medicine – using new technology to supposedly enhance medical interventions. From his interview on R4 this morning, it doesn’t sound as if he’s been convinced.

Art and the brain

On R4's Woman's Hour today there was an inteview with Susan Aldworth, an artist who has worked with neuroscientist Dr Fiona Lebeau. The results is a series of images inspired by Aldworth's own scans after she inhaled too much white spirit in her studio and suffered a minor bleed on the brain. The work is varied, and draws on science in interesting ways, but Aldworth's main preoccupation is trying to explore the material basis of personality. In an innovative take on sci-art as process as well as product, she has experimented with etching techniques and developed a method in which the chemical processes are analogous to those in the brain that might be responsible for personality.

The exhbition, Scribing the Soul, is at the Transition Gallery, Unit 25a, Regent Studios, 8 Andrews Road, London E8 and is on until 17 August 2008.

Portraits of macular degeneration

Artist Adam Hahn is exhibiting work resulting from his year-long research of how the vision is affected of people suffering from the common eye disease, macular degeneration. He worked with opthalmologist Professor Pete Coffey and used data from the Moorfields Eye Hospital. But mostly he talked to his sitters. The project is important in that Hahn found that medical textbooks often misrepresent the vision loss that patients experience, describing it as a black hole rather then the graduated blurring effect that Hahn has managed to capture. His method was to use photographs initially, digitally manipulating them and showing them to the sitters (who often still have good peripheral vision) to verify that it accurately represents the way they see. He then paints the portraits on canvas. Hahn and Coffey were interviewed on Radio 4's Front Row on Thursday 12 June, and the programme is available on Listen Again for a week.

The paintings are on show until 17 July 2008 at the Macalls Gallery, Paddock Wood, Kent.

Patterns crystallise in new exhibition at Wellcome Trust

The Wellcome Collection has a super little exhibition on how crystallography has influenced art and design. Built around the work of the 'Festival Pattern Group', the exhibition features design products for the 1951 Festival of Britain that were inspired by the kaleidoscope-like diffraction patterns of X-ray crystallography.

My visit fortuitously coincided with a very interesting talk by Bonnie Ann Wallace, professor of Molecular Biophysics at Birkbeck, who explained why crystallography lends itself so well to artistic interpretation. Professor Wallace had brought along some props from her lab which helped to demonstrate trends in crystallography -- how it has moved from drawing and 3D modelling to computer imaging.

The objects on display range from wallpaper inspired by the crystalline structure of insulin to carpet designs and crockery. Intriguing is a beautiful evening gown worn by the wife of crystallography pioneer, Sir Lawrence Bragg. It is embroidered with the hexagonal patterns of Beryl minerals.

'From Atoms to Patterns' runs at the Wellcome Collection on Euston Road, London, until 10 August 2008. If you can't make it in person, the exhibition website is packed with information.

Stages of Dying

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Social networking meets health care

New Scientist has picked up on the popularity of a networking site called patientslikeme. This is more than an information-sharing site, it encourages patients to record their symptoms and responses to treatment regimes on a regular basis. There is a star-based incentive programme for patients to keep their information up to date. The site makes money, not from advertising revenue, but from aggregating, anonymising and selling on the data to 'life science companies for treatments' (is that a euphemism for pharmaceutical companies?).

For the site to work, it means that patients have to forgo their privacy. The site encourages 'an openness philosophy'. Of course, you can still use a 'handle' instead of your real name, but many members upload photographs and make an extraordinary amount of information available. A bot like Facebook's live streaming, members with mood disorders can record 'instant mood', as well as a detailed breakdown of symptoms which are all plotted graphically. Check out Zephyr_Marie's profile as an example of how much information is available.

With rumours that DIPEx (a UK based website of interviews with patients) is going to become subscription-only, patientslikeme is potentially groundbreaking. It challenges a longstanding assumption that people are less likely to be 'honest' on the web. The site currently has 11850 members and covers ALS/Motor Neuron Disease, Anxiety, Bipolar, Depression, HIV/AIDS, Multiple Sclerosis, OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder), Parkinson's disease, and PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder).

Although the numerical data is publicly available, but you have to be a member to access the patients' stories (on the forums). By foregrounding the data aspects, it tells only one, very medicalised, version of the patient experience. It's an interesting experiment though, and worth watching to see if it does herald a seachange in the attitude to patient confidentiality and medical data.

Do the arts make you a better doctor?

There is a great discussion going on the BMJ blog on the value of the arts to medicine.