Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A surgeon and painter, pioneer of transplant surgery who performed 1,500 kidney and 1,000 liver transplants, and painted portraits of his patients.
On the island
Eight records
Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13 "Pathétique"
It got me interested in music, uh listening to it for the sake of listening.
I used to sing his songs to my children and one they uh used to like very much was I gave my love a cherry because the last bit is there's a child with no crying.
Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op. 115
Thea King with the Gabrieli String Quartet
The singing and beauty of the clarinet is, I think, one of the most wonderful passages in the music repertoire that I've heard.
Dies irae from Messa da Requiem
Vienna Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan
It was such a magnificent setting and such a wonderful sound that uh I'd like to hear that.
Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95 "From the New World"Favourite
Philharmonia Orchestra, Carlo Maria Giulini
The two of us were walking up the hill and we heard the [Dvořák] New World Symphony coming from an open window. It was a very beautiful and still is a beautiful memory.
Près des remparts de Séville (Séguedille) from Carmen
Teresa Berganza, Plácido Domingo, London Symphony Orchestra, Claudio Abbado
In which Carmen uh mocks and taunts the young soldier, saying wouldn't you rather stay with me?
Là ci darem la mano from Don Giovanni
Roger Soyer, Helen Donath, English Chamber Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim
Another very beautiful song, but it shows uh how she succumbed to the smooth talk of the handsome Don.
String Quintet in C major, D. 956 (second movement)
Kocian Quartet with Daniel Weiss
A neighbour of mine who played uh the cello… said that this is for him the music he would like to hear uh whilst he was dying.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:24How much are you still moved by the loss of a patient?
I don't think that changes at all. I think from the very beginning as a medical student and throughout one's career, if a patient dies, it's always the tragedy. And one's always looking at oneself for mistakes one might have made or alternative treatments that might have been better.
Presenter asks
6:17Do [your patients] worry about your listening to music, perhaps not totally concentrating on them [during surgery]?
It does produce an an air of calm and particularly stops people uh getting uh tense and and uh with jangled nerves, which can happen and is always to the detriment of the patient. And in any case the patient has no idea what's going on anyway.
Presenter asks
12:17Why back then? I think you were even discouraged by the Nobel Prize winner, Sir Peter Medawar, weren't you? You were told immunology cannot help with transplant surgery.
Uh well he yes, it wasn't quite like that. He gave a lecture… and at the end of the lecture which he gave in Oxford, one of the students asked him if there was any practical application for treatment of patients, and he paused for a moment and then said two words: absolutely none. But this struck me as very strange, because he had shown that there was a way, although it wasn't one that was immediately practicable. And I went to see my boss then in Oxford, who was a friend of Medawar's, and said I'd like to work with him when I finished. He said Medawar was a very busy man. He said, 'You go and learn how to do hernias and don't waste his time.' So there wasn't very much encouragement, but I think lack of encouragement sometimes stimulates one.
The keepsakes
The book
He suggested a book which looked a very nice one called Global Biodiversity, which would have information on plants and animals, which would be a starting point in trying to classify what was going on in the island in terms of animals and plants. I think that that would be something to work on as a beginning any rate.
The luxury
A luxury would be uh would have to be paints and uh a canvas, I suppose. I think there's nothing else that I would need so much as that. to try and record what was going on.
Presenter asks
19:48You hold no great brief, I think, for current methods of running the health service – providers and purchasers. How much damage do you think it's done?
I think it's wasted a hell of a lot of money because there's some very highly qualified accountants on both the purchasers and the provider's side, and they have a happy game of monopoly discussing what the best price and bargain they can produce. It doesn't do any good, the money's not real. And I think that it has demoralized to a great extent the workers in the health service who feel that this is irrelevant.
Presenter asks
24:40Why would a man so eminent in his field [surgery] plunge head first into somebody else's [the population debate] in that way? Why did you do it?
Um yes, the license bit was was one paragraph, I think, in two hundred pages. And I said that we are quite strict in safety regulations for who drives a potentially lethal weapon, namely a car, and uh perhaps we should also have a similar serious attitude to having children.… But the idea of writing a book about this started uh when I was in Bombay. And I saw some of the population there around the airport. There are about a million around the airport.… living in terrible poverty and uh I went to the children's hospital and they told me that children are brought in dead every day from simple diseases… And then I was just mulling in my own mind of the kind of work that I do, expensive high tech surgery for a few relatively privileged people. But if I was in charge of the World Health Organization, I would regard most high tech Western medicine as quite irrelevant because there's about one billion of the five billion in the world are living in poverty, close to starvation…
Presenter asks
32:23Let me ask you finally about death, because you're a man who's obviously seen a lot of it at close hand. Does it alter your attitude to death at all? Do you fear it, or do you feel comfortable with it?
Well, I think uh uh it does – I do fear it because it's totally unknown what happens uh afterwards, although one may have beliefs. Uh the evidence for any afterlife is uh somewhat thin, but I think that with an idea of uh the way the human race is uh really a continuum of its DNA, in a way there is an immortality to uh the race of uh beings, not only our species but every species, if we don't destroy it.… Death, if it comes quietly, can be friendly. Often it's very traumatic and horrible, particularly in patients who are kept alive too long by artificial means.
“I don't think that changes at all. I think from the very beginning as a medical student and throughout one's career, if a patient dies, it's always the tragedy. And one's always looking at oneself for mistakes one might have made or alternative treatments that might have been better.”
“Many of his paintings look like Saint Sebastian, he and the doctors the torturers firing their darts into him.”
“I asked our chief physician whose firm I was on if one of my patients, who was about my age, who was dying of kidney disease, could have a grafted kidney, and he said no. … And I was nudged by one of my friends not to ask any more questions if I wanted to get a house job at Guy's, so I didn't ask any more questions. But that was the beginning of the idea.”
“I think it's not only the medical profession, I think it's uh human nature. If you're used to something and it works and it's not too bad as far as you're concerned, you don't want anybody rocking the boat. People who rock the boat are usually regarded as dangerous.”
“And we did have a beautiful collie dog called Lollipop, who was a very long survivor with a kidney transplant, and she was presented at the big auditorium at the Brigham as if she was a patient with a kidney graft. … And then the resident who'd presented the case opened the door and Lollipop bounded into the auditorium and licked all the eminent professors in the front row. … And this was a fairly dramatic demonstration that it worked, although it wasn't a patient.”
“Most high tech Western medicine is quite irrelevant because there's about one billion of the five billion in the world are living in poverty, close to starvation.”