Medicine and Manga

I have recently compiled a review for a favourite manga (Japanese graphic novel) of mine, and Dr. Ian Williams has kindly hosted it on his website, where he details about various graphic novels with a medical content.

If anyone is interested; I enclose the required link.

Medical waxworks

The lovely artist and sculptor Eleanor Crook is featured in a video made to accompany the Wellcome Collection's new exhibition, Exquisite Bodies (on until 18 October). Eleanor taught a very good life-drawing class on our medical humanities course at Imperial College in April. She has a fascinating job making models, often from wax, for medical purposes. You can see some of her work here. One of her models, showing the different plastic surgery techniques developed during and after the First World War, can be seen at the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons in London.

Doctoral opportunity

The Centre for Medical Humanities, School of Medicine and Health at Durham University offers a fully funded three year doctoral scholarship in philosophy of medicine to consider the nature of the relationships among music, embodiment, health and well-being.

Music’s therapeutic potential is widely sought within formal clinical ‘music therapies,’ which are the subject of a considerable body of educational, psychological and health services research; the neurological substrates of musical experience are also investigated by neuro-scientific research. However such researches are relatively disconnected from philosophical understandings of music and of embodiment. As part of its five-year Wellcome Trust Strategic Award programme ‘Medicine and Human Flourishing,’ the Centre for Medical Humanities wishes to pursue philosophical understandings of the experience of music in the context of embodiment, and into the nature and meaning of musical experience and its relation to our sense and experience of our own embodied nature. Existing educational, health services and neurological research may be reconsidered in relation to the philosophical work as it develops.

Applications are invited from candidates with a first-class degree in Philosophy and relevant interests pertaining to music, embodiment and well-being. The work will be primarily supervised by Professor H Martyn Evans (Professor of Humanities in Medicine, Centre for Medical Humanities) in association with Professor Max Paddison of the Department of Music, whose research interests include philosophy of music and music therapy.

Further details about the research opportunity are available from Professor Evans (h.m.evans@durham.ac.uk). Further information about the work of the Centre for Medical Humanities is available at www.dur.ac.uk/cmh and information about work on music therapy at the Department of Music is available from Professor Paddison (m.h.paddison@durham.ac.uk) or at the Department’s website www.dur.ac.uk/music.
Applications must be made on line. Full details available from: http://www.dur.ac.uk/school.health/postgraduate/apply/

Closing date for receipt of applications: 31st August 2009

Read more: http://scholarship-positions.com/wellcome-trust-doctoral-studentship-centre-for-medical-humanities-durham-university/2009/08/02/#ixzz0N9CbSXPf

Tribute to Dr Cecil Helman

I was very sad to hear that Dr Cecil Helman died yesterday after a short illness. I first got to know Cecil at a Medical Humanities conference about 6 years ago. I had just been sent a copy of his book, 'Suburban Shaman' -- it was not yet then published in Britain. We had a fascinating discussion about which aspects of the South African edition might need to be changed for a British audience (should a 'station wagon' be referred to as an 'estate car'?). We became friends. Cecil came and gave a lively session on my Medical Humanities course at Imperial for several years. This year he cried off, explaining that he was experiencing minor problems with his vocal chords. Tragically, the problems did not prove minor, but were a symptom of motor neurone disease.

Cecil specialised in medical anthropology. His textbook 'Culture, Health and Illness' has seen numerous editions, and he wrote many other seminal books and papers. But he also turned his hand to poetry, philosophy and fiction. 'Suburban Shaman' is a witty and profound memoir of his training and experiences as a GP. Cecil was never anything less than forthright. He managed to tread on quite a few toes as a consequence of his scepticism of institutional processes. But alongside his individualism, he was profoundly interested in the welfare of communities and individuals. He was fascinated by people and their stories and he had a real gift for passing those stories on, through his lectures and writings.

Cecil was a one-off. He delighted in being deliberately subversive. I remember him at conference flummoxing a presenter by proceeding to provide a detailed medical diagnoses of the subject of a portrait, in direct contradiction of everything that had just been said about the role of observation in medicine. 'I just wanted to see how she would handle it,' he said afterwards, with a characteristic twinkle in his eye.

Cecil added a great deal of flavour to the Medical Humanities scene in London, and, gosh, I will miss him.

'Pulse' exhibition featured on podcast

Elizabeth Hauke has put together a very nice item on the 'Pulse' exhibition featured on the monthly Imperial College Podcast. Download it here. Anjani Knoebel's work (pictured below) is one of the artworks discussed.

'Pulse'

This painting by fourth-year medical student Priya Garg is a response to examining and taking a medical history from a torture victim. 'When I presented the case to the consultant he believed, rightly or wrongly, that the circumstances of the injury were not important,' says Priya, 'whereas I felt it was vital to see illness in the context of the patient narrative.' Every year students of Medical Humanities at Imperial College London hold an exhibition of artworks they have created as part of the course. This year's exhibition, curated by Mindy Lee, is in the Blyth Gallery, level 5, Sherfield, runs from 13 to 28 May. The official opening is on 12 May at 7.30 pm. Everybody welcome!

Tribute to UA Fanthorpe

Today I came home to a wonderful fat cardboard package on my doorstep: the result of an indulgent splurge on Amazon. The parcel included a volume from my wish list, long wanted but a pleasure postponed. However, two days ago, I’d decided it was indispensable and placed my order: Collected Poems of UA Fanthorpe. I spent a happy few hours dipping into this substantial anthology this afternoon, savouring familiar poems and relishing newfound treasures. Frustrated by the sketchy foreword, and half thinking how nice it would be to invite Fanthorpe to Purple Coat Club, I reached for that trusty tool of all things biographical, Wikipedia, to gauge the poet’s current coordinates. How shocking to see, at the base of her entry, ‘Ursula Fanthorpe died on 28 April 2009’. BBC website confirmed it – the news released by her publisher today. What an unnerving coincidence.

I first across UA Fanthorpe’s poems in a musty library copy of an anthology of medical poetry. The poem was ‘Jobdescription: Medical Records’, a wry, subversive description of the qualities needed to overcome the lurking horrors in the ‘seamy insides of notes’. By emphasising the qualities not required in the potential applicant, the poem tells us so much about the poignancy of the job: ‘Weights of histories (puffy / for the truly ill, thin and clean / For childhood’s greenstick fractures) / Will not concern you’.

Fanthorpe worked as a hospital receptionist in Bristol which inspired her first volume of poetry in 1978. She says in the foreword to Collected Poems, ‘At once I’d found the subject that I’d been looking for all my life: the strangeness of other people, particularly neurological patients, and how it felt to be them, and to use their words.’ Her Casehistory poems ‘Julie (encephalitis)’ and ‘Alison (head injury)’ speak to the alienation of brain damage: ‘I would have liked to have known / My husband’s wife, my mother’s only daughter’ (from ‘Alison’).

Having set ‘After Visiting Hours’ recently as an essay topic, to be contrasted with Sylvia Plath’s ‘Tulips’, my thoughts have been much preoccupied with this beautiful poem in which a hospital becomes a refuge from the ‘calling gulls’ of visitors, in which staff and patients carefully dance their way through ‘Their repertoire of movements’. I hope Fanthorpe found her last days in a hospice as soothing as the environment she conjures up for the shuffling, glass-bodied patients in this poem.

Although I have mentioned some of the medical poems here, Fanthorpe wrote on a huge range of topics, from Shakespeare to pets, university life to Christmas. Many of them are suffused with a gentle humour, others are more sharply acerbic. I’ve never met a Fanthorpe poem I haven’t liked. I am glad to have been thinking so much of her during her final days. She came to public attention in 2003 as rival to Andrew Motion for Poet Laureate, but I still feel she is underrated. I'm confident that UA Fanthorpe will come to be remembered as one of our greatest poets.