Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Physician, philosopher, poet and novelist; a leading medical thinker specializing in geriatric medicine who reversed his view on assisted dying after a personal
On the island
Eight records
Kyrie (from Missa Papae Marcelli)
Pro Cantione Antiqua, conducted by Mark Brown
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
It is a marvellous combination of joy and sadness. It's a bit like a rainbow on a waterfall. It has that extraordinary feeling, and also the sense of the world being trans illuminated with awe.
Berceuse (from Dolly Suite, Op. 56)
It's probably the first bit of music that I remember, because it was the signature tune for Listen With Mother... this piece of music extends throughout my life, because towards the end of his life my father went blind and he developed an interest in classical music, and we used to play a lot of tunes, including the lullaby from Faure, and he enjoyed it enormously.
Inevitably being a child whose adolescence coincided with the rise of the Beatles, and what's more, being a liver puddlin, I must have one of the Beatles' tunes. And the one I have chosen is Hey Jude, because that, more than any other tune, captures for me the sense of the infinite possibility you have when you're young.
Prelude (from Cello Suite No. 6 in D major, BWV 1012)
the fourth piece in music is the Bach Cello Suites, and they are particularly associated for me with Chris Verity, who has been my longest standing friend... he gave it to Terry and myself as our wedding present, and therefore he's always associated with this particular piece of music.
String Quartet No. 7 in F major, Op. 59 No. 1, 'Rasumovsky' (1st movement)
This I associate with the time when Terry and I, Terry and my wife, and I met. And we both loved classical music and we both fell in love with chamber music. I mean this is an extraordinary happy time in my life.
String Quintet in C major, D. 956 (1st movement)Favourite
Melos Quartet with Mstislav Rostropovich
I suppose it's absurd to describe anything as the greatest X or Y, but I have to say that if there is such a thing as a greatest piece of chamber music it must be Schubert's string quintet.
Sextet: Riconosci in questo amplesso (from The Marriage of Figaro)
Cast of The Marriage of Figaro
One of the wonderful things about Mozart is he can turn human bickering into the most delicious, fantastic music, and nothing could be better illustrated than this beautiful sextet from Figaro.
Greece has been a very important part of my life and of Terry's life... Cornwall also matters enormously... And the boys, detecting there was a certain amount of mildew on the collective soul, would say, Come on, Dad, let's have the Greek and we would play some music by Theodorakis...
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:05Your father once asked why you wanted to treat old people since everyone has to die of something. Did he have a point?
His point was undermined by the fact that he was ninety-two when he asked me and he was in receipt of a lot of good medical treatment and was benefiting from it. And I think in a way it's important not to think of medical care of older people as being hedged around with lots of ethical problems. Most medical care of older people, like the medical care of younger people, actually consists of getting people back on the feet and returning to everyday life.
Presenter asks
2:24Can you paint a picture of how things looked on your geriatric ward rounds in the early 1980s?
Things were pretty grim. I mean, many patients were not managed well. The patients on the whole were in their seventies and early eighties, whereas now they're largely in their eighties and early nineties. The health of older people has improved enormously. There's no patient for whom you can't do something that will make their life better, even if they have a condition that isn't essentially reversible.
Presenter asks
3:13Have you witnessed things as a doctor that have solidified your view that humans are unique?
The keepsakes
The book
Martin Heidegger
It is probably the greatest work of philosophy of the twentieth century. I have written a book about it already, but I feel I have hardly sort of dipped my toe in the water.
The luxury
Video recording of an ideal family day in Cornwall in 1995
I'd love that for two reasons. One is it would stop my memory, as it were, eroding. I would remember how things actually looked, and the other is because I'm interested in unpacking the miracle of everyday life, I could use that basically as the material which I would endlessly unpack while I'm on the island.
No, I think it's come really from everyday life, and curiously, scientific medicine tries to close the gap between ourselves and animals. The success of scientific medicine is based on the fact that we approach our bodily ills as the ills of an organism, an organism that is not too different from the other organisms in nature. And that's one of the paradoxes of medicine, because obviously the knowledge that we have of the human body is unlike any knowledge that any other animal has of its body.
Presenter asks
15:58When you went up to Oxford at seventeen, did it matter to you that other students were posher and richer?
They did. I was very aware that people were posher. I also thought people were brighter. And I think I was very conscious that people were richer. I was pretty hard up at Oxford, actually. My father kept a tight rein on the expenses. One of the first things would happen when I would come home at the end of each term. We'd go through the notebook, and in the notebook I'd have to note down every single item of expenditure.
Presenter asks
18:46Can you describe your shocking experience working in Nigeria at twenty-four?
It was I guess I wasn't prepared for the corruption, for the indifference people had to each other's suffering, for the disorganisation and incompetence.
“the great challenge of geratic medicine, indeed the great challenge of medicine, is to make the health span approximate more and more closely to the life span, and we're making huge progress in that direction.”
“Sometimes people do find it difficult to accept, you know that life is a condition with our 100% mortality. Nobody gets out of life alive.”
“the idea you force a patient to fight their way out of life through this horrible barbed wire entanglement of dehydration and malnutrition, I think is quite unacceptable.”