Medicine Unboxed
by Medicine Unboxed
Medicine Unboxed aims to inspire debate and medicine and to inform its culture. Medicine Unboxed is for the public, for health professionals and for all of us who will be patients one day. Despite scientific advances, medicine faces moral, political and social challenges that require the pursuit of meaning as much as knowledge. The arts and other disciplines can help to illuminate the central questions and to foster awe, empathy and humility.Our annual events - Unboxed (2009), Stories (2010), Values (2011), Belief (2012), Voice (2013), Frontiers (2014), Mortality (2015), Wonder (2016), Maps (2017), Love (2018) and MATTER (2023) - each have drawn audiences of over three hundred people. Our Soundcloud and Vimeo archives have been seen and heard by tens of thousands of people.Our speakers are writers, politicians, philosophers, scientists, musicians and performers. The events are theatrical, moving and challenging and are performances in themselves.
Episodes
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MATTER - Arthur Jeffes And Sarah Gabriel - SONG
Described by Le Monde as ‘As fine an actor as she is a singer’ (Eliza Doolittle, My Fair Lady, Theatre du Chatelet), Sarah Gabriel is a singer, writer, and actor with a passion for creating work with artists of all disciplines. Arthur Jeffes founded Penguin Cafe in 2009, bringing together a...
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MATTER - Helen Gordon - TIME
Helen Gordon's books include Notes from Deep Time (Profile), Landfall (Penguin) and, with Travis Elborough, Being a Writer (Frances Lincoln). She has written about nature, science, clothes and books for various newspapers and magazines including the Economist's 1843 magazine, the Guardian and…
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MATTER - TABLA - Gurdain Rayatt
Born and raised in UK, Gurdain Rayatt is one of the leading tabla players and teachers in UK and Europe performing internationally with renowned Indian Classical musicians as well as world/crossover and fusion projects spanning several genres.
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MATTER - Lucy Winkett - ASH
"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.
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MATTER - Sam Guglani - BLUE
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…
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MATTER - Gavin Francis - BODY
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.
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MATTER - Tim Dee - DUST
"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…
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MATTER - Liz Berry And Zaffar Kunial - ENGLAND
"In the owl-light, / when loneliness shines / through your bones like a bare bulb." Liz Berry is an award-winning poet from the Black Country and the author of The Patron Saint of Schoolgirls, Black Country and The Republic of Motherhood. Zaffar Kunial was born in Birmingham and lives in Hebden...
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MATTER - Peter Apps - FIRE
"The plastic bonding the metals together is polyethylene. It is literally solid petrol and will burn like it. This is what was starting to happen at Grenfell Tower." Peter Apps is an award-winning journalist and Deputy Editor at Inside Housing. He broke a story on the dangers of combustible...
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MATTER - Hayley Campbell - FLESH
Hayley Campbell is an author, broadcaster, and journalist. Her work has appeared in WIRED, The Guardian, New Statesman, Empire, GQ, and more. Her books include All the Living and the Dead and The Art of Neil Gaiman.
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MATTER - Max Porter - GHOST
Max Porter worked as a bookseller at Daunt Books and was later editorial director of Granta and Portobello Books. In 2015, he published his first novel, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, which won several awards including the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser and Dunlop young writer of the year and the...
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MATTER - Katherine Rundell - GOLD
"Dear friends, would you look, only look. For love, allied to attention, will be urgently needed in the years to come." Katherine Rundell is the author of Rooftoppers, Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner), The Wolf Wilder, The Explorer, The Good Thieves, and The...
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MATTER - George Saunders - HUMAN
"Who am I? Everybody. Individuals within that multitude are always flickering on and off within me, stepping forward, then receding." George Saunders is the author of nine books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize, and the story collections Pastoralia and…
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MATTER - Richard Horton - LIFE
"It is neither a wholly mechanistic nor a wholly metaphysical question. Yet it remains for many patients a deeply important one: What is this disease doing to me?" Richard Horton qualified in physiology and medicine with honours from the University of Birmingham in 1986. He joined The Lancet in...
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MATTER - Queenie Chan - METEORITE
"The meteorite provided us with a window into the past, how simple chemistry kick started the origin of life at the birth of our solar system." Queenie Chan is a planetary scientist and a meteoriticist. Chan is currently a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Department of Earth Sciences of the...
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MATTER - Nick Lane - MEMBRANE
Nick Lane is Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London. He is the author of five acclaimed books on evolutionary biochemistry, which have sold more than 150,000 copies worldwide, and been translated into 25 languages.
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MATTER - Sally Hayden - OCEAN
“For months or years, bodies are pressed into bodies, lives dependent on other lives. You become cargo, a piece of meat, a being that loses humanity.” Sally Hayden is an award-winning journalist and photographer currently focused on migration, conflict and humanitarian crises. She has worked with...
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MATTER - Sarah Perry - ORBIT
"I’ve always said there are no mysteries, only things we don’t know; but lately, I’ve thought not even knowledge takes all strangeness from the world." Sarah Perry is the internationally best selling author of the novels Melmoth, The Essex Serpent, and After Me Comes the Flood, and the…
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MATTER - Chamakur Ghag - PARTICLE
Chamkaur Ghag is an astroparticle physicist working in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UCL. Chamkaur received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2006 following his work on novel technologies to detect dark matter. He held post-doctoral positions at the University of Edinburgh...
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MATTER - Stephen Ellcock - PATTERN
"We have searched for correspondence between the heavens and the Earth and between nature and the human body. " Stephen Ellcock is a renowned image collector whose online “cabinet of curiosities”—an ever-expanding, virtual museum of art that is open to all via social media—has attracted more than...
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MATTER - Arthur Jeffes - PIANO
Arthur Jeffes founded Penguin Cafe in 2009, bringing together a talented and disparate group of musicians initially to perform his father Simon Jeffes’ legacy of world renowned PCO music, ten years after his untimely death in 1997. Arthur, a talented composer in his own right, quickly began to...
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MATTER - Kit De Waal - SKIN
"One of the pods hangs low, right next to Leon’s face. Inside are five tiny black seeds, smaller than his little fingernail. He picks one out and holds it up to the sun." Kit de Waal was born in Birmingham to an Irish mother, who was a childminder and foster carer and a Caribbean father. She…
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MATTER - Richard Holloway - SPIRIT
"In an aimless universe the emergence of compassion is an evolutionary miracle, a shock as remarkable as the sudden jump into life." Richard Holloway is a Scottish writer and broadcaster, and was formerly bishop of Edinburgh in the Scottish Episcopal church.
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MATTER - Anil Seth - WORLD
"What makes the difference between being conscious at all and being a chunk of living meat, or lifeless silicon, without any inner universe?" Anil Seth is a neuroscientist, author, and public speaker who has pioneered research into the brain basis of consciousness for more than twenty years.
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Mark Taubert - Medicine Unboxed VOICES
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…
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Mark O'Connell - Medicine Unboxed VOICES
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…
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Samantha Harvey - Medicine Unboxed VOICES
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…
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Jenn Ashworth - Medicine Unboxed VOICES
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…
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Sue Black - Medicine Unboxed VOICES
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…
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Richard Horton - Medicine Unboxed VOICES
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…
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Deborah Bowman - Medicine Unboxed VOICES
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…
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Kit de Waal - Medicine Unboxed VOICES
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...
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Richard Holloway - Medicine Unboxed VOICES
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…
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Sarah Perry - Medicine Unboxed VOICES
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...
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Danny Dorling - Medicine Unboxed VOICES
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...
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LOVE - Sean Elyan - WOOD
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.
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LOVE - Sarah Moss - WALLS
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.
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LOVE - Zaffar Kunial - US
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.
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LOVE - Stella Duffy - UNWRITTEN
Stella Duffy OBE is a writer and theatremaker.
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LOVE - Roger Kneebone - TOUCH
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.
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LOVE - Jessie Greengrass - SEE
Jessie Greengrass published a collection of short stories called, An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It in 2015. It won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize.
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LOVE - John Danaher - ROBOTS
John Danaher holds is a lecturer in law at NUI Galway (Ireland). His research interests are eclectic, ranging broadly from philosophy of religion to legal theory, with particular interests in human enhancement and neuroethics.
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LOVE - Tom De Freston - POESIE
Tom de Freston is an artist based in Oxford. His practice is dedicated to the construction of multimedia worlds, combining paintings, film and performance into immersive visceral narratives.
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LOVE - Daniel Locke - NOTHING
Daniel Locke is an artist and graphic novelist. His most recent graphic novel Out of Nothing, was published in November 2017 by Nobrow Press. Daniel’s work is featured in many anthologies of contemporary comics, and in 2016 his novella Pneuma was published in the USA by Tinto Press.
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LOVE - Will Eaves - MURMURS
Will Eaves is a novelist, poet and teacher. He was Arts Editor of the Times Literary Supplement and is Associate Professor in the Writing Programme at the University of Warwick.
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LOVE - Iona Heath & Raymond Tallis - MEDICINE
Raymond Tallis is a philosopher, poet, novelist, cultural critic and a retired medical physician and clinical neuroscientist. Iona Heath was president of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) from 2009–2012.
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LOVE - Daniel Trilling - LIGHTS
Daniel Trilling is a British journalist, editor and author. He is the editor of New Humanist magazine.
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LOVE - Havi Carel - ILLNESS
Havi Carel is a professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol. Her research interests include philosophy of medicine, phenomenology, philosophy of death, epistemic injustice and health, illness, and children, and film and philosophy. Carel is best-known for her work on the phenomenology of...
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LOVE - Eley Williams - GLOSS
Eley Williams is a British writer. Her debut collection of prose, Attrib. and Other Stories (Influx Press, 2017)was awarded the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize 2018. She teaches at Royal Holloway, University of London and supervises Jungftak, a journal for...
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LOVE - Mark Thomas - CULTURE
Mark G. Thomas is a human evolutionary geneticist, Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at the Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London.
About this show
Medicine Unboxed aims to inspire debate and medicine and to inform its culture. Medicine Unboxed is for the public, for health professionals and for all of us who will be patients one day. Despite scientific advances, medicine faces moral, political and social challenges that require the pursuit of meaning as much as knowledge. The arts and other disciplines can help to illuminate the central questions and to foster awe, empathy and humility.Our annual events - Unboxed (2009), Stories (2010), Values (2011), Belief (2012), Voice (2013), Frontiers (2014), Mortality (2015), Wonder (2016), Maps (2017), Love (2018) and MATTER (2023) - each have drawn audiences of over three hundred people. Our Soundcloud and Vimeo archives have been seen and heard by tens of thousands of people.Our speakers are writers, politicians, philosophers, scientists, musicians and performers. The events are theatrical, moving and challenging and are performances in themselves.
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Medicine Unboxed