A playlist of poetry from Medicine Unboxed.

Poetry

Everyone will be, at some point, a patient. Bobby Baker has been a patient, artist, and performer. Wearing a white coat, she talks to Sam Guglani at Medicine Unboxed 2013 about the patient's voice. 

Performed Voice : Bobby Baker is a woman, and an artist. She lives in London. In a career spanning nearly four decades she has, amongst other things, made a life-sized edible version of her family and driven around the streets of London strapped to the back of a truck yelling at passers by through a megaphone to ‘Pull Yourselves Together.’

Performed Voice

Medicine Unboxed MATTER took place on 13 May 2023 at Kings Place London. 

We wondered about the shared and changing substance of our planet; the brevity and connectedness of human and other life; what separates death from life; the privileged and the destitute; bodies, stone, ash and ghosts; about matter's arrival at beauty, consciousness, words and story. 

We tussled with what finally matters, here in what T. S. Eliot called ‘our twittering world.’

Medicine Unboxed 2023 MATTER

The world’s sheet, or its shroud, the lanes of a face etched in it. Or words, all of them, all knowledge, the found and lost truth of things, grid lines of metaphor, particles of us or is it waves? - rising and falling onto a brief shore of land. Measurements fail even now of your body, its contours and margin, where its meaning lies, our picture an opening of pure fractal, an unfolding view of coast. What is the unfathomable distance to another person, another place, the invisible track of starlings in murmuration, the wayward trail of your heartbeat on paper, its luck?

Medicine Unboxed 2017 MAPS

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Late Fragment by Raymond Carver

Medicine Unboxed 2018: love was on 24/25 November 2018 at the Parabola Arts Centre, Cheltenham.

Medicine Unboxed 2018 LOVE

"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.

MATTER - Anil Seth - WORLD

"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.

MATTER - Richard Holloway - SPIRIT

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 create new and unique genre-defying music, with the spellbinding philosophy of the Penguin Cafe always in his mind.

MATTER - Arthur Jeffes - PIANO

"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 633,000 followers worldwide. His most recent book, Underworlds: A Compelling Journey Through Subterranean Realms, Real and Imagined, was published in the United Kingdom, United States, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He is also the author of The Cosmic Dance: Finding Patterns and Pathways in a Chaotic Universe.

MATTER - Stephen Ellcock - PATTERN

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.

MATTER - Nick Lane - MEMBRANE

"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 Royal Holloway University of London in the United Kingdom. Her research focuses on understanding the earliest chemical reactions involving liquid water in the solar system, and how the individual events turned simple life’s building blocks into increasingly complex molecules that ultimately yielded life. Her work typically involves the analysis of the chemical and organic contents of astromaterials including meteorites and asteroidal/cometary samples returned by space missions.

MATTER - Queenie Chan - METEORITE

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 Dylan Thomas prize. It was later adapted into a play directed by Enda Walsh. His second book, Lanny, was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn prize in 2019 and is being adapted into a film starring Rachel Weisz. Shy, his latest novel, was published by Faber in 2023.

MATTER - Max Porter - GHOST

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.

MATTER - Hayley Campbell - FLESH

"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 cladding thirty-four days before the Grenfell Fire. He has not stopped reporting on this national tragedy since, and his coverage of the public inquiry has received widespread acclaim. He lives in London.

MATTER - Peter Apps - FIRE

"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 Bridge. He published a pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series in 2014 and spent that year as the Wordsworth Trust Poet-in-Residence. Since his first public reading, of 'Hill Speak' at the 2011 National Poetry Competition awards, he has spoken at various literature festivals and in programmes for BBC radio, and won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize for his poem 'The Word'.

MATTER - Liz Berry And Zaffar Kunial - ENGLAND

"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.

MATTER - Tim Dee - DUST

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.

MATTER - Gavin Francis - BODY

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.

MATTER - Sam Guglani - BLUE

"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.

MATTER - Lucy Winkett - ASH

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.

MATTER - TABLA - Gurdain Rayatt

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 Wired UK, and is a former Granta magazine editor.

MATTER - Helen Gordon - TIME

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 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.

MATTER - Arthur Jeffes And Sarah Gabriel - SONG

Philip Hoare (born 1958, Southampton) is the author of six works of non-fiction: Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant (1990) and Noel Coward: A Biography (1995), Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the First World War (1997), Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital (2000), and England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia (2005). Leviathan or, The Whale (2008), won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction.

An experienced broadcaster, Hoare wrote and presented the BBC Arena film The Hunt for Moby-Dick, and directed three films for BBC’s Whale Night. He is Visiting Fellow at Southampton University, and Leverhulme Artist-in-residence at The Marine Institute, Plymouth University, which awarded him an honourary doctorate in 2011.

He is also co-curator, with Angela Cockayne, of the Moby-Dick Big Read, www.mobydickbigread.com

FRONTIERS - Phillip Hoare - SEA

Philip Gross was born in 1952 in Cornwall, and grew up in Plymouth. With a Cornish mother and an Estonian father, Gross has emerged as one of the greatest poetic voices of displacement, conveying what Terry Eagleton views as “lost bearings and blurred frontiers” (Independent on Sunday). He won an Eric Gregory Award in 1981 and, in the following year, won the National Poetry Competition. He was recently awarded the TS Eliot Prize for his collection The Water Table (Bloodaxe, 2009). His other collections for adults include Familiars (Peterloo, 1983), The Ice Factory (Faber, 1984), Cat’s Whisker (Faber, 1987), The Son of the Duke of Nowhere (Faber, 1991), I.D. (Faber, 1994), The Wasting Game (Bloodaxe, 1998), Changes of Address: Poems 1980-1998 (Bloodaxe, 2001), Mappa Mundi (Bloodaxe, 2003) and The Egg of Zero (Bloodaxe, 2006).

FRONTIERS - Philip Gross - FIELD

Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist and writer who practised in London, but now lives on the Isle of Skye, where he continues to write and make a living by lecturing.

He is committed to the idea that the mind and brain can be understood only by seeing them in the broadest possible context, that of the whole of our physical and spiritual existence, and of the wider human culture in which they arise – the culture which helps to mould, and in turn is moulded by, our minds and brains.  

FRONTIERS - Ian McGilchrist - THOUGHT

Performed Voice: Ballistic Buns is a brief fragment of Bobby Baker's research into her own family history focusing on mental illness, family survival techniques and the impact of war, unhappiness and frustrated ambition on subsequent generations.

This 10-minute piece involved tales of the Vicar of Byker, the Ballistic Engineer, the Life Long Anorexic, the 16” German Howitzer named affectionately 'Big Bertha', capable of blasting plenty of folk to smithereens in the First World War, the Dambusters of the Second World War and a Tasty Ending.

Bobby Baker is a woman, and an artist. She lives in London. In a career spanning nearly four decades she has, amongst other things, made a life-sized edible version of her family and driven around the streets of London strapped to the back of a truck yelling at passers by through a megaphone to ‘Pull Yourselves Together.’

Baker’s touring exhibition Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me 1997- 2008 premiered at the Wellcome Collection in 2009, and the accompanying book of the same name won the Mind Book of the Year 2011. Her most recent live show, Mad Gyms & Kitchens, was commissioned as part of the London 2012 Unlimited project for the Cultural Olympiad.

Baker is a past recipient of three separate Wellcome Arts Awards, and occupies a unique professional and personal position in the worlds of both the arts and mental health. Following an AHRC Creative Fellowship at Queen Mary University, London she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in 2011.

Bobby Baker is the Artistic Director of Daily Life Ltd, part of the Arts Council National Portfolio.

VOICE - Bobby Baker performs Ballistic Buns

Performed Voice : Bobby Baker is a woman, and an artist. She lives in London. In a career spanning nearly four decades she has, amongst other things, made a life-sized edible version of her family and driven around the streets of London strapped to the back of a truck yelling at passers by through a megaphone to ‘Pull Yourselves Together.’

Baker’s touring exhibition Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me 1997- 2008 premiered at the Wellcome Collection in 2009, and the accompanying book of the same name won the Mind Book of the Year 2011. Her most recent live show, Mad Gyms & Kitchens, was commissioned as part of the London 2012 Unlimited project for the Cultural Olympiad.

Baker is a past recipient of three separate Wellcome Arts Awards, and occupies a unique professional and personal position in the worlds of both the arts and mental health. Following an AHRC Creative Fellowship at Queen Mary University, London she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in 2011.

Bobby Baker is the Artistic Director of Daily Life Ltd, part of the Arts Council National Portfolio.

VOICE - Bobby Baker talks to Sam Guglani - PERFORMED VOICE

The Heard Voice - Eleanor Longden, David Sturgeon and Richard Bentall in discussion.

VOICE - Eleanor Longden, David Sturgeon and Richard Bentall - HEARD VOICE

Hidden Voice - Stephen Grosz in conversation with Sam Guglani. 

Stephen Grosz is a practicing psychoanalyst—he has worked with patients for more than twenty-five years. Born in America, educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Oxford University, he teaches at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London. He lives in London.

VOICE - Stephen Grosz - HIDDEN VOICE

MORTALITY - Bob Heath

Medicine Unboxed 2015 MORTALITY looked at life and death and the lines that separate them.

We will marvel at how molecules are arranged into life and examine other beginnings and endings, of the universe and how all nature folds and unfolds in time. We will wonder about time. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, in our homes and fields. We will see medicine’s hand raised against death and suffering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We will ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural differences in the experience of death, how immortality is conceived in mythology and sought in technology, our pursuit of the afterlife, and how fact and imagination meet in our encounter with death.

MORTALITY - Nick Lane - LIFE

MORTALITY - Allan Kellehear - ENDS

MORTALITY - Jane Draycott Rebecca Goss And Jo Shapcott - ELEGY

PhiL Hammond is a physician, broadcaster, comedian and commentator on health issues in the United Kingdom. He is best known for his humorous commentary on the National Health Service.

WONDER - Phil Hammond - EVERYTHING

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

BELIEF - John Burnside - First Signs of Ageing

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

BELIEF - John Burnside - First Footnote on Zoomorphism

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

BELIEF - John Burnside - Hall of Mirrors 1964

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/

Richard Holloway - Medicine Unboxed VOICES

Laurence Rees is a former Head of BBC TV History Programmes.

For the last twenty-five years he written books and made documentaries about the Second World War and the Third Reich. His work includes 'Nazis: a Warning from History' (1997); 'War of the Century' (1999); 'Horror in the East' (2001); 'Auschwitz, the Nazis and the 'Final Solution'' (2005); 'World War Two: Behind Closed Doors' (2008) and 'The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler (2012)'. His ninety-minute feature length documentary, 'Touched by Auschwitz', transmitted on BBC2 in 2015.

His latest book, 'the Holocaust: A New History', was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and described as "the finest single volume account of the Holocaust" by The Daily Telegraph.

MAPS - Laurence Rees - HOLOCAUST

Medicine Unboxed 2018: MAPS. The world’s sheet, or its shroud, the lanes of a face etched in it. Or words, all of them, all knowledge, the found and lost truth of things, grid lines of metaphor, particles of us or is it waves? - rising and falling onto a brief shore of land. Measurements fail even now of your body, its contours and margin, where its meaning lies, our picture an opening of pure fractal, an unfolding view of coast. What is the unfathomable distance to another person, another place, the invisible track of starlings in murmuration, the wayward trail of your heartbeat on paper, its luck?

MAPS - Sheldon Thomas - GANGS

Sarah Perry was born in Essex in 1979. She has a PhD in creative writing from Royal Holloway, and has been the Writer in Residence at the Gladstone Library and the UNESCO World City of Literature Writer in Residence in Prague. Her first novel, 'After Me Comes the Flood', was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Folio Prize, and won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award in 2014. Het second book, 'The Essex Serpent' was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2017, chosen as Waterstones Book of the Year 2016, awarded Book of the Year and Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards 2017 and longlisted for the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

MAPS - Sarah Perry - ESSEX

Caspar Henderson is the author of 'The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary' which was shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science books and for which he received the Author’s Foundation Roger Deakin Award 2009 and The Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non Fiction 2009. His latest book, 'A New Map of Wonders: A Journey in Search of Marvels' will be published by Granta in November 2017.

He has been a journalist and editor with various publications and broadcasters. He is a past recipient of an IUCN-Reuters award for best environmental reporting in Western Europe. He has worked as a consultant and advisor with leading voluntary organisations, government and international agencies. He co authored 'Our Fragile Earth' (New Internationalist, 2005) and was the commissioning editor for 'Debating Globalization' (Polity, 2005).

MAPS - Caspar Henderson - DREAMS

Denise Riley is the author of the poetry collections 'Marxism for Infants', the volume 'No Fee' with Wendy Mulford, 'Dry Air', ' Stair Spirit', 'Mop Georgette', 'Selected Poems' and most recently 'Say Something Back', which was nominated for a Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection. Her chapbook, 'Time Lived, Without Its Flow' is a meditation on time after the sudden death of a child. A sequence of 20 short poems from the chapbook, titled 'A Part Song', was published in the London Review of Books and won a Forward Poetry Prize for Best Single Poem.

MAPS - Denise Riley - DETOUR

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.

LOVE - Sean Elyan - WOOD

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.

LOVE - Sarah Moss - WALLS

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.

LOVE - Zaffar Kunial - US

Stella Duffy OBE is a writer and theatremaker.

LOVE - Stella Duffy - UNWRITTEN

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.

LOVE - Roger Kneebone - TOUCH

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.

LOVE - Iona Heath & Raymond Tallis - MEDICINE

Jo Shapcott reads her poem 'Of Mutability' from her 2010 Costa Book Award winning collection of the same name. 

"Mutability means change, mutation" says Shapcott. "It's often seen in terms of darkness, decay and death - but there are also green shoots. In the poem both things are reflected, both sides of change. Change is the only thing that's inevitable - so let's love it."

BELIEF - Jo Shapcott - Of Mutability

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. 

BELIEF - Rupert Sheldrake - KNOWLEDGE

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.

BELIEF - Questions for Jo Shapcott

Richard Horton, Colin Leys, Clare Short and Matthew Flinders deliver short position statements on health and justice at Medicine Unboxed 2012.

BELIEF - Health and Justice - position statements at Medicine Unboxed 2012

Questions for Colin Leys, Clare Short, Richard Horton and Matthew Flinders on the need for time in health, the collection and use of information, the market-led NHS, the medical media and how to take effective action in the public sector. 

BELIEF - Colin Leys, Clare Short, Richard Horton and Matthew Flinders - health and justice

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 contact with your sense of self. I tried to find something that was causing my insomnia, to try and decode it…I was deep in this knot of suffering but thought ‘how can I keep finding the most perfect, apt and succinct way of expressing this…writing is the most joyous and liberating thing in the world.’”

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/

Image: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/books/review/samantha-harvey-shapeless-unease.html

Samantha Harvey  - 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 - 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 Science Museum in London. 

He featured in two palliative care themed recordings for the BBC Listening Project and his posthumous letter to David Bowie, which discussed the importance of good end of life care, went viral and has been made into a touring classical music composition and has been publicly read by, amongst others, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jarvis Cocker in locations including New York, London, Hay-on-Wye, Edinburgh and Berlin.

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/

Mark Taubert - Medicine Unboxed VOICES

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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