This one day conference is the brainchild of Dr Sam Guglani, a clinical oncologist who specialises in the treatment of patients with breast, lung and brain cancers. You might think this would be enough to keep him busy, but working with people at such a vulnerable and formative time in their lives has clearly left him wondering how to best understand and encapsulate all the things his patients have taught him and that so rarely appear in medical textbooks and research papers.According to Dr Guglani, “good medicine necessitates scientific and technical excellence. It also demands engagement with patients as individual human beings with unique values, fears and hopes. Further, good care extends beyond a delivery of the technically tenable, to an appraisal of the ethically appropriate. As such, medicine is unquestionably informed by science but also necessarily by the humanities and arts. The humanities perhaps have the capacity to broaden doctors understanding of the human condition thus enabling a window through which the perspectives of others may be vicariously experienced.” I couldn’t agree more.

Medicine Unboxed is an NHS initiative, in partnership with Cheltenham Literature Festival, so you may meet more than the usual medical conference crowd at this event. Speakers include  Jo Shapcott, Raymond Tallis, Allan Kellehear, Raanon Gillon, Patrick Leman, Raymond Tallis,  Gabriel Weston, Richard MacCormac and Jane Willis. All that plus lunch for £10 means tickets are going fast.

To find out more and to reserve a place contact Sam on sam.guglani@glos.nhs.uk