Medicine Unboxed

"In spring things come together, blood flows into the heart and away from the heart, swallow appear and swallows vanish." Tim Dee was born in Liverpool in 1961. He has worked as a BBC radio producer for twenty years and divides his life between Bristol and Cambridge. He is the author of THE RUNNING SKY (2009) and FOUR FIELDS (2013). He is also the editor of GROUND WORK, an anthology of nature writing, which Jonathan Cape published in March 2018. LANDFILL, Tim's book on gulls, literature and landfill sites, was published by Little Toller Books in October 2018. GREENERY: JOURNEYS IN THE SPRINGTIME was published by Jonathan Cape in March 2020.

Gavin Francis is a GP, and the author of True North and Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins, which won the Scottish Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and Costa Prize. He also writes for the Guardian, the Times, London Review of Books and Granta.

Dr Sam Guglani is a Consultant Oncologist in Cheltenham, specialising in the management of lung and brain tumours. He has Masters degrees in Ethics and Creative Writing. He is director of Medicine Unboxed, which illuminates the challenges and wonders of medicine through the arts. Sam’s debut novel, Histories, was published in 2017.

"God is with humanity. Intertwined in all the mess and unsteadiness: in the vulnerability of a baby and with the light and power of the sun." Ordained as a priest in 1996, the reverend Lucy Winkett is rector of St James's Piccadilly and was formerly canon precentor of St Paul's Cathedral, London.

Mark Taubert, Clinical Director, Consultant Physician & Honorary Senior Lecturer in Palliative Medicine at Cardiff University School of Medicine, talks to Sam Guglani about death, sadness, pain and loss in his work as a palliative care doctor, and about his own experience of - and feelings about - death. Mark founded TalkCPR and has a national lead role to improve public understanding on topics relevant to care in the last years of life and at the extreme ends of medicine. He has written about palliative care in The Washington Post, The Guardian, Quillette, Chicago Tribune, The Times, The Independent, The Big Issue, BBC News & HuffPost UK and appeared on BBC’s Horizon, ITV's BAFTA-winning Hospital of Hope. He has also engaged in cultural collaborations to promote debate about palliative care including ‘The Colours’, a West End show in London's Soho Theatre, a National Theatre Wales' production ‘As Long As The Heart Beats’ and has talked at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, at Hay Literary Festival and the S

Sam Guglani talks to journalist, essayist and literary critic Mark O’Connell, author of ‘To Be a Machine’ (Granta 2017, winner of the Wellcome Prize) and ‘Notes from An Apocalypse:  A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back’ (Granta, 2020). ‘To Be a Machine’ explores transhumanism - using machines to optimise human cognition and extend human life, and the Silicon Valley belief that the human body is an outmoded device. For advocates of transhumanism, death is ‘wrong’ - an idea which at first seems difficult but as Sam and Mark discuss, ‘the body as machine’ is not so far from the assumptions that underlie all modern medicine. Mark says “It’s both wrong and right to say we are machines - but we are not just machines. It’s a metaphor and the idea that we are spiritual is also just a metaphor. It all just reduces to language.” Mortality, what it means to be embodied, our experience of time, and how we view ourselves in relation to nature, and love - and if they are reducible to the mechanistic con

Samantha Harvey is Reader in creative writing at Bath Spa University and is the author of four novels, 'The Wilderness', 'All Is Song', 'Dear Thief' and 'The Western Wind', and of a memoir, published in January 2020,  'The Shapeless Unease'. Her novels have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, the Walter Scott Prize and the James Tait Black Prize, and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Baileys Prize, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize and the HWA Gold Crown Award. The Wilderness was the winner of the AMI Literature Award and the Betty Trask Prize, and The Western Wind won the 2019 Staunch Book Prize. In this episode, Samantha talks to Sam Guglani about ‘The Shapeless Unease’ and how an intense and disturbing experience of insomnia drove her writing and resulted in a book which was “fragmented and disjointed in terms of interest, subjects, tone, voice and register”. As Samantha says, unease is “something that runs deep in you and somehow comes into contac

In this episode of Medicine Unboxed: VOICES, Sam Guglani talks to Jenn Ashworth, author of 'A Kind of Intimacy',  'Fell' and most recently 'Notes Made While Falling'. In this discussion, Jenn talks to Sam about her encounters with doctors as a child raised in a Mormon community and about the role of fiction in her understanding of the world and of illness. Jenn talks about her experience of becoming ill after the birth of her child, her feeling that she was “too ill to even want healing... to imagine that was even possible” and how she translated this into her writing. “My writing changed through being ill. Previously I wanted to use writing to speak, to communicate…afterwards it’s more about listening, a process by which I shed my layers, my armour, my certainty, my expertise - and let the world get me.” Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. 

Sam Guglani talks to Professor Dame Sue Black OBE about her early childhood experiences, how they shaped her future career and about how important her teachers have been to her - and why we have a duty to let others who have changed our lives know the impact they have had on us. Sue talks about how forensic anthropology is changing, about her work in identifying perpetrators of child sexual abuse and in war crimes investigations and about hope, optimism and how she maintains objectivity when faced with the effects of human cruelty. “Even in the most awful situations,” she says, “you can find something that says humanity is better than this.” Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/ Image credit: BBC.

Richard Horton is Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet. He was born in London and is half Norwegian. He qualified in physiology and medicine from the University of Birmingham in 1986 and joined The Lancet in 1990, moving to New York as North American Editor in 1993. Richard was the first President of the World Association of Medical Editors and he is a Past-President of the US Council of Science Editors. He has a strong interest in global health and medicine’s contribution to our wider culture. He now works to develop the idea of planetary health – the health of human civilizations and the ecosystems on which they depend. In this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES, recorded before COVID-19, in a wide-ranging discussion Richard talks to Sam Guglani about his roots and formative experiences - and more recently his own illness - about the value of cooperative behaviour, about scientific publication, trust and politics, and the role of medicine as a global force for good. In a statement that prefigures the current

Deborah Bowman is Professor of Ethics and Law at St George's, University of London. In this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES, Deborah talks to Sam Guglani about ethics, law and the tensions between them in the context of medical ethics and about her own experience of illness. Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/

Kit de Waal has received numerous awards for her writing including the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize 2014 and 2015, the SI Leeds Literary Reader's Choice Prize 2014 and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Her first novel, 'My Name is Leon', was published in 2016 and shortlisted for the Costa Book Award. In this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES, Kit speaks with Sam Guglani about My Name is Leon and about childhood pain, loss, humanity and compassion, about 'embracing the grey' of right and wrong and about the role of literature and knowledge.  Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/

Richard Holloway was Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church. He is the award-winning author of On Forgiveness, Looking in the Distance, Godless Morality, Doubts and Loves, Between the Monster and the Saint and Leaving Alexandria. In this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES, Richard speaks with Sam Guglani about ageing, his draw to and ambivalence around religion, the shared human capacity for cruelty, the vital duty towards kindness, and the possibility of hope. Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. https://realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/

Sarah Perry is the award-winning author of three novels—After Me Comes the Flood, The Essex Serpent and Melmoth. Her work interrogates matters of faith, science and human suffering, and she is an extraordinary storyteller. In this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES, Sarah speaks with Sam Guglani about her own encounter with illness and medicine, the value of fiction, the vagaries of moral judgment, and the presence of mystery in the pursuit of knowledge. Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. https://realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/

Danny Dorling is a social geographer and is the Halford Mackinder Professorship in Geography in Oxford. He has studied and published extensively on issues concerning housing, health, employment, education and poverty. His collaborative work on the Worldmapper project has resulted in collection of world maps or ‘cartograms’, where territories are re-sized according to a subject of interest, for instance, inequality. In this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES, Danny speaks with Sam Guglani about social inequality, personal and political responses to it, and its profound impact on the health and wellbeing of societies. Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. https://realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/

Dr Elyan qualified in medicine from Bristol University and obtained further medical experience in the West Country. His oncology training was at Cambridge and Manchester where he did a research degree through the Paterson Institute and the Royal Marsden Hospital in London as a Senior Registrar.

Sarah Moss is an English writer & academic. She has published 6 novels as well as a number of non-fiction works and academic texts. Her work has been nominated three times for the Wellcome Book Prize.

Zaffar Kunial is a British poet born in Birmingham, who currently lives in Shipley, Yorkshire. His mother was English and his father, who has since moved to Lahore, is from Kashmir.

Stella Duffy OBE is a writer and theatremaker.

Roger Kneebone directs the Imperial College Centre for Engagement and Simulation Science. The Centre's aim is to advance human health through simulation, collaborating closely with clinicans, scientsts, patients, publics and experts outside medicine.