Illustrated talk for University of Kent symposium on Artists’ Books and the Medical Humanities, on 21 April 2016 http://www.kent.ac.uk/english/research/conferences/artistsbooks.html I had been so looking forward to this wonderful symposium devised, designed and immaculately planned by Stella Bolaki, and to seeing the exhibition of Martha Hall’s and other book artists’ work – which is still on […]
Guest blog for BMJ Medical Humanities by Clare Best Recently I’ve been thinking about cutting/editing and scars/memories. In two linked pieces for the BMJ Medical Humanities blog, I take a look at my own relationship first with knives and cutting and then with scars and memories. Part two: Scars and memories If […]
Recently I’ve been thinking about cutting/editing and scars/memories. In two linked pieces for the BMJ Medical Humanities blog, I take a look at my own relationship first with knives and cutting and then with scars and memories. Part one: Knives and cutting Among my clearest memories of childhood are strong sensory […]
A political leader declares war on stroke Churchill’s secret- ITV drama- shown on Sunday 28th February 2016 Directed by Charles Sturridge 5* Released on DVD later in 2016 […]
Reflection by Clare Best Risk-reducing bilateral mastectomy, December 2006. We have breast cancer in the family, on my mother’s side. While I was starting to think about whether to have preventive surgery, my cousin developed multiple aggressive tumours. This meant that in two generations of women I was the only one who had not yet […]
Louise Kenward interviews Clare Best about her multimedia project Breastless, published online recently as part of ‘Life Writing Projects’, a joint project between The Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research and REFRAME at the University of Sussex. In Breastless, Best traces her experiences of risk-reducing bilateral mastectomy through prose, a sequence of poems […]
Take Me With You: the Museum of Friendship, Remembrance and Loss 6.00-8.30 pm, Thursday 18 February 2016 at the Chowen Lecture Theatre, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, Falmer Campus BN1 9PX Museum open from 6.00 pm Clare Best and Tim Andrews in conversation (+q&a) 6.30-7.30 pm Drinks reception from 7.30 pm Museum open until 8.30 […]
‘Over the Hill’ at Create Gallery New England House New England Street, Brighton, BN1 4GH until 17 October Tim Andrews was working as a solicitor when he was diagnosed in 2006 with Parkinson’s Disease and was obliged to retire. The following year he responded to an ad in Time Out for ‘real-life’ nude models – […]
Reflections from the 5th International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine by Clare Best This year’s Symposium invited us to focus on how we might begin to define the term ‘medical poetry’ and asked if that is even a useful aim. Michael Hulse started the day with a thought-provoking talk proposing that the Romantic ego […]
Podcast by Clare Barker and Lynn Wray The 1984 Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, India, is recognised as the world’s worst industrial disaster. It has killed around 25,000 people to date, and the health of thousands of families in Bhopal continues to be affected by a groundwater supply contaminated by toxic chemicals from the now abandoned […]