Last week I attended a conference at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. ‘This Is My Body’ was co-organised by Olivia Will from the Department of Surgery and by Lucy Razzall from the Faculty of English. It brought together humanities scholars, surgeons, and others, to share ways of thinking about mind and body, identity and experience. You can see the programme here.

It wasn’t built around the idea that Literature Knows Something About Your Brain, but there was general agreement that a strict split between mind and body wasn’t holding on either side of the disciplinary divide, and there were several threads of thinking that made me want to post about the event.

One thing that struck me was how subtly ways of being articulate and inarticulate ran through the conference. A psychiatric patient asked to describe the ‘representation’ of her medically unexplained pain has to interpret the word (), and find her own terms to explain. Hester Lees-Jeffries showed the vivid metaphors and measurements of wounds in Shakespeare and his time – what lay within the bodies afflicted by these wounds was left unexpressed. Roger Kneebone showed a video of an experienced surgeon inviting a colleague to ‘put your finger in there and feel the… er…’, and noted himself that real bodies (as opposed to images in textbooks) have lots of unnamed ‘stuff’ in them. Rowan Williams argued that bodies are never just ‘stuff’ (indeed, he argued that even ‘stuff’ is never just ‘’) – everything has an interactive life in the world (‘rights’, he said, was a related concept) to which we need to attend (‘trust’ was a key word in his assessment of this relationship, and it reverberated in context of doctor and patient).

Roger Kneebone’s explorations of surgery as art and performance were new to me, and if they’re new to you as well, I recommend this video:

You may want to see it in its own window, because I’ve made it rather small, so as not to make too much of a gap in my post.
      There’s a more sober experience of his work, a British Medical Journal paper, here.

Another thing that struck me was the link between art and surgery and the implications of this link. Ludmila Jordanova started off with the art of surgery, including wonderful images from Barbara Hepworth’s hospital works, which you can read about here and elsewhere. We saw rib cartilage sculpted into an ear. We saw the watercolours surgeons painted in their operative notes and textbooks, and the sculpture classes for plastic surgeons in training. There was some resistance (by the multitalented people involved) to the idea that this was really art – it could be functional, effective description for the need-to-know people. Rowan Williams, though, proposed in his talk that there could be no disengaged descriptions, only representations (that word again), and it’s not difficult for a literary person to agree with that.

Another thing that struck me was the difficulty of maintaining the links between mind and body in surgical circumstances. A talk about transplant surgery by Andrew Bradley (Surgery, Cambridge) was full of sensitivity to the families of donors and the anxieties of recipients (can someone else’s heart or hand really be part of you?). But at some point a kidney, drained of donor fluids and held on ice before reaching its recipient (unforgettable video of the kidney colouring again with new blood), is easily thought of as just tissue (or ‘stuff’). Another talk by Kajsa Widegren and Erika Alm (Cultural Science, Gothenburg) on speech therapy for transgender women made me think about the materiality and socialization of the voice: it seems that adding a female voice to other aspects of womanhood means speaking as if you have different vocal chords, but also speaking as if you have a different relationship to the social world. ‘Alexa and the Others’, a film by Conny Karlsson Lundgren which they discussed (see the website here), is well worth chasing up.

The last thing I’ll mention that struck me is a particular link between storytelling and causation. Sarah Gull, a gynaecological cancer specialist, quoted W.H. Auden’s poem ‘Miss Gee’. In the poem a doctor asks ‘Why didn’t you come before?’ to his patient, who has presented far too late with sarcoma. Medical notes do not ask that (all-too-often askable) question, and the doctors present agreed that it rarely seemed a useful or gentle one to raise. But when the stories of patients (with professional discretion, of course, I should probably say) were told, elaborating even just a little on the notes, pathways of possible causation emerged: stories cause causes.

It was an absorbing and thought-provoking event. In a subsequent post I hope that another delegate, Roz Oates, will post about her project linking poetry and memory.