Medicine Unboxed: frontiers and mortality

Abstract

www.thelancet.com Vol 386 October 24, 2015 1611 Debate and cultural change in medicine are at the heart of Medicine Unboxed. Since 2009 we have invited health professionals and the public to engage in dialogue about how medicine encounters society. At our annual events, patients, physicians, writers, philosophers, politicians, performers, and artists discuss medicine’s goals and society’s values, often seen through the prism of the medical humanities. Last year’s Medicine Unboxed was on the theme of Frontiers. Speakers explored the moral interface between the individual and society; the line that separates life and death, self and other; technological advances that demand reappraisal of our understanding of humanity and life; and the resonances between a changing landscape, ageing, and human fi nitude. In the next few weeks, the Art of Medicine section in The Lancet will feature essays that came out of the Frontiers event from Philip Gross, Yasmin Gunaratnam, Christopher Potter, and I. On Nov 22, 2015, in Cheltenham, UK, the theme of Medicine Unboxed is Mortality. Our speakers and audience will explore life and death and the lines that separate them. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, and in our homes. We’ll see medicine’s hand raised against death and suff ering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We’ll ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural diff erences 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. At this year’s event speakers will include Marion Coutts, Rhidian Brook, Henry Marsh, Ann Wroe, Michael Symmons Roberts, Dave Goulson, Iona Heath, Julian Baggini, Salley Vickers, Allan Kellehear, Peter Stanford, Jo Shapcott, Ray Tallis, Sue Black, Jane Draycott, Richard Horton, Jay Carver, Rob George, Nick Lane, Katie Siddle, Bob Heath, Tom de Freston, Peter Thomas, Rebecca Gross, and Paul McMaster. The conference will also see the award of the Medicine Unboxed Creative Prize. I hope reading the essays in The Lancet will encourage you to come and join the debate.