Medicine Unboxed:
Belief
From the delightful slender flyer
deriving beauty from three pictures of brain haemorrhages, to the accessible
£45 conference fee to the 12 hours of intense debate tempered with literature,
poetry, comedy, music and magic (and that was just Saturday!).
From the imaginative leap of Sam
Gugliani, Oncologist, to realise there was an audience for this event to the
effort and research it is evident he put into co-ordinating the fourth Medicine
Unboxed, added to his ability to engage and question with such confidence,
knowledge and dexterity.
Medicine Unboxed was nothing like
I expected. Though I had no idea what to expect.
My particular highlights:
1) Poetry by Jo Shapcott and her
honesty at not knowing exactly what imagination is and John Burnside being beamed
in from Ireland .
2) Adam Kay's How to be a bogus
doctor. Especially loved his idea of making a scan machine by cutting a washing
machine in half and putting a lilo on either side and using masking tape to
hide the facts and the cracks.
3) I returned on Sunday morning for
Health and Justice, a debate I imagined would be dry and boring. This was the
most engaging and surprising debate of the weekend and this debate elevated itself above the people
on the panel, the people in the Parabola Arts Centre and I feel every delegate
carried the memory of this debate with them.
I was staggered by the scale and
scope of this forum and delighted to have been part of this rewarding and
massively ground-breaking experience.