I am fortunate enough to count Professor Jonathan Glover, a world renowned medical ethicist, amongst my former teachers. A very modest and thoughtful man, Jonathan Glover spent a number of years writing a similarly thoughtful book in which he tries to understand what he terms man’s inhumanity to man (Humanity: a Moral History of the Twentieth Century. Pimlico, London 2001). His starting premise is that, given the wrong circumstances, we are all capable of doing evil things to other human beings. At the heart of his efforts are a desire to understand, for all our sakes, what it  has taken in the past, and by extension what it would take in the future, for people- just like you and me- to be willing to take part in our own equivalent of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide.

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Half a lifetime ago I went to Australia for my medical elective, a joyous interlude just before finals that allows doctors-to-be to savour, for one last time, the freedom of life as a student. Eight weeks is barely time to get over the jetlag let alone to adjust to the stark and breathtaking landscapes that unfurl in any journey across this large and mystifying country. Yet long enough to leave the lasting impression that no matter how impressive the delights of Sydney and Melbourne and Australia’s other cities and towns, this is a country only a blink away from submission to its own awesome forces of nature.

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Albert Camus argued that anyone who chooses life over death is an absurd hero. Absurd because Camus could see no logical reason why anyone would choose the pain and suffering that living even the most blessed of lives entails when ultimately the struggle to stay alive will surely fail. And heroic because, in full knowledge of this truth, and in full knowledge of the burden of pain and loss that staying alive will inevitably entail, a person who chooses life and not death somehow finds the courage to make that choice. more…

I’m grateful to Christy Henshaw for letting me know about an exciting new project from the Wellcome Trust. So far about 100 films from the Trust’s vast archive of film and video have been digitalised and can be viewed by anyone, free-of-charge, on-line. 

A brief glance at the titles led me to a fascinating insight into how the British Medical Association, in 1967, tried to engage with the public about growing concerns regarding childhood obesity. The way in which the issue of childhood obesity is framed in the film- including the language used and the overt and unashamed signaling that allowing a child to be fat both stigmatises them and threatens their health- will surely enrich the thinking of contemporary medical humanities scholars interested in the so-called obesity epidemic.

To see this clip click on the link below.

Cruel Kindness

The list of available titles in the Wellcome Library Catalogue can be seen by following the link below. This resource will shortly be available via Flash Player which should make access easier.

http://catalogue.wellcome.ac.uk/search/a?searchtype=Y&searcharg=electronic+resource&SORT=D&searchscope=3&submit.x=30&submit.y=14

Full details, from Christy, follow.

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Caramel, to be precise: a delicious film from Lebanon that gives a brief insight into the lives of five women friends. Unlike in Sex and the City, there isn’t any on-screen sex in this film. Nevertheless, the main protagonists in these two newly released films would, I suspect, recognise many of their own challenges in each other’s stories. Like all women of a certain age in the UK- somewhere between 15 and 50 to judge bythe cinema queues- I enjoy the openness, the bawdy humour, the fashion and the sentimentality that is Sex and the City. But I also recognise, in the experiences of Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda, the stories of both patients and friends.

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