Back from the Association of Medical Humanities conference in Truro – I arrived home at 1.30 a.m., way past my usual bedtime. The conference closed a bit earlier than I expected, so I shelved my original plan to stay an extra night and travel home in a leisurely fashion during the daylight. Unfortunately the bus to the railway station was late, and I ended up starting my seven-and-a-half hour train journey at a quarter to five in the evening. Add to that the hour and a quarter to get home from the station at this end…..it was actually beginning to get light by the time I finally got to bed. I am too old for this!!
The conference, however, was a really interesting experience and a chance to meet a great diversity of folk from all over the world. Conferences are often huge and rather lonely events: no-one talks to you, and if you don’t already know some of the delegates, you end up not talking to anybody for days. At Truro, by contrast, everyone talked to everyone else all the time. Unfortunately, I didn’t take my camera so the only photograph I have is stuck on my mobile phone.
We presented our paper on setting up the Art & Anatomy SSCs to a small and polite audience in a session which also included presentations by Christine Borland and Lucy Lyons, so we were in distinguished company.
The highlight of the conference, for me, was the screening of David Cotterell’s film “The Green Room”, made during his residency with the Royal Army Medical Corps in Afghanistan. The film was made in the Field Hospital as the surgical staff wait for an influx of wounded soldiers. Apparently calm & detached, it is charged with emotion and layers of meaning. Superficially, one might think that nothing much is happening, just slow, almost choreographed movements to a soundtrack synthesised from unintelligible conversations and the sound of helicopter rotor blades. In fact the suspense is palpable; the action is occurring elsewhere – either just out of shot or just out of focus at the back of the tent. People move with deliberation, enhanced by the video technique: they are alert, anxious even, but prepared for tasks to which they have become accustomed. At one moment, suddenly, someone laughs soundlessly and you realise that the tension has been released by a joke you can’t hear. And, with unbearable poignancy, when a casualty does arrive and is wheeled to the back of the operating theatre, the surgical team still waiting for their patient turn slowly round to look, torn between concern for the new arrival and the anticipation of their own task. The claustrophic setting is not contextualised geographically or politically within the film (although this was done in detail during David Cotterell’s lecture to the conference). There is no overt ethical judgement: we are asked to examine our own feelings about this particular situation and about warfare in general, and to reflect upon the paradox of healing in the context of conflict.
