Medicine Unboxed

JACKIE KAY was an adopted child of Scottish/Nigerian descent brought up by white parents in Glasgow, a heritage she explored in Red Dust Road, an account of her search for her natural parents. She is one of Britain’s best-known poets, appearing frequently on radio and TV programmes on poetry and culture. She has won the Signal Poetry Award, the Guardian Fiction Prize and was the British Book Award...

JACKIE KAY was an adopted child of Scottish/Nigerian descent brought up by white parents in Glasgow, a heritage she explored in Red Dust Road, an account of her search for her natural parents. She is one of Britain’s best-known poets, appearing frequently on radio and TV programmes on poetry and culture. She has won the Signal Poetry Award, the Guardian Fiction Prize and was the British Book Award...

JOCELYN POOK is an award-winning British composer who has performed with artists including Peter Gabriel, Laurie Anderson, Mark Knopfler, 3 Mustaphas 3, PJ Harvey and as a member of the Communards. She has released several albums including Deluge (1997), Flood (1999) and Untold Things (2003). Jocelyn’s score for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut received a Chicago Film Award and a Golden Globe nomi...

MELANIE PAPPENHEIM has devised work with many leading multimedia groups such as Lumiere & Son, DV8 Physical Theatre (Strange Fish) and The Shout, of which she is a founder member. Melanie can be heard on TV and film soundtracks including Derek Jarman's Edward II and The Garden and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. REBECCA ASKEW is a performer and songwriter. She studied jazz at the Guildhall Sc...

FI GLOVER, ranked amongst the top ten British voices in a poll conducted by Radio Times, is a Sony award-winning broadcaster who has worked on BBC’s The Breakfast Show, Broadcasting House and Saturday Live, and for GLR and 5 Live, and was chair of judges for the Orange prize for fiction in 2009. She presents The Listening Project, a partnership between BBC Radio 4, BBC local and national radio sta...

Sam Guglani in discussion with Colin Leys, Richard Horton, Clare Short and Matthew Flinders on the HNS, equality, health and the broader social determinants of health that may go unaddressed. Have the values that created the NHS changed, and are we handing over the NHS to organisations that are, in Colin Leys' words "not dedicated to community interests but to shareholder interests"?

Ray Tallis and Rupert Sheldrake discuss the limitations of reason, the dogma of science and the evolution of knowledge in medicine.

John Burnside reading 'First SIgns of Ageing' for Medicine Unboxed 2012.

John Burnside reading 'First Footnote on Zoomorphism' for Medicine Unboxed 2012.

John Burnside reading 'Hall of Mirrors 1964' for Medicine Unboxed 2012.

In one of the more unlikely conversations at Medicine Unboxed 2012, Rupert Sheldrake and Ray Tallis discuss science, canine intuition, and coming out.

Jo Shapcott reads 'I go inside the tree' from 'Of Mutability'.

Dr Sam Guglani's introduction to Medicine Unboxed 2012.

Rupert Sheldrake, author of 'The Science Delusion', talks about scientism, the conflict between science as a belief system and science as method of enquiry, and the 10 dogmas of modern science. Rupert challenges us to question our beliefs about the scientific worldview - and what might result if we did.

Ray Tallis explores knowledge and medicine, scientific paradigms and consciousness.

Questions for Ray Tallis and Rupert Sheldrake from the audience, focusing on phenomenology, postmodernism, complementary medicine and biomedical discourse and the role of scientific evidence in medicine.

Jo Shapcott talks about Medicine Unboxed: "Extraordinarily, extraordinary. Like a university education up to PhD level in one-and-a-half days".

Sarah Ahmed, #mu12 intern, on her experience of Medicine Unboxed.

What is the imagination for? Sam Guglani and Jo Shapcott explore cracks in the edifice of reason, and what new ways we can understand the imagination. Jo draws on her experience of her own illness and how the imagination works with a diagnosis of serious illness - her "cellular imagination".

John Burnside talks to Sam Guglani and Jo Shapcott about metaphor and imagination and its force in the world. We hear John reads his poem "First Signs of Ageing" via Soundcloud.

Questions from the audience for Jo Shapcott: should imagination be prescribed, metaphor and the collective imagination, empathy and imagination as core clinical values, the roll of poetry in medical education and why hypotheses don't arrive from heaven.

Charles Fernyhough on the 'rush to the neuro' in the popular press, can neuroscience can explain the human experience, if there is such a thing as neurotruth - and how it might affect the way we see ourselves.

"I am my body. I am not my body." So begins Tim Parks at Medicine Unboxed 2012 on his experience of illness, treatment and medicine and his experience of mortal life.

Charles Fernyhough and Tim Parks in discussion on materialism, experience and the existential phenomenon that - in Tim's words - dogs live in a world of pleasure beyond anything we know.

Questions for Charles Fernyhough and Tim Parks from the Medicine Unboxed audience - on alternative medicine, Christianity and role of the physical, spiritual and emotional in mental illness.