What will we make of today's waves of human migration (and their associated traumas) in years to come? Kate Clanchy believes they will be seen as a new Holocaust: the vast number of children who have lived side-by-side extraordinary violence. She was speaking at Medicine Unboxed, a festival exploring the cultural place of medicine in society. The theme this year was “Maps”. Clanchy is a writer and poet. She works at a school in Oxford that receives refugees from Afghanistan and Syria. She is wary of those who say the best way to deal with trauma is “to vomit it up and move on”. No, she argues. What children must learn is to control their expression by finding their voice and wording their experience. One girl, Shakila, had seen a woman's head blown off by a terrorist bomb. “So many traumas”, said Clanchy. Each child holds within them the additional trauma of a lie. You had to lie to escape war. That lie is big for a child. Writing poetry is a path back to truth. Her school has created remarkable moments. Sunni and Shia children working together, writing together. “More people must see this”, she insists. Laurence Rees quoted Toivi Blatt, a Jewish Sonderkommando in the Sobibór death camp: “All of us could be good people or bad people in these [different] situations.” Rees explained that doctors were “absolutely core” to the Third Reich. Hitler's notions of racial poisoning and the racial state had two consequences. The elimination of all those who were not of your race and the elimination of perceived “weak elements” within your race. Doctors were instrumental in realising both objectives. 45% of all German doctors were members of the Nazi Party. In 1939, half of all students in Germany were studying medicine. The attraction of medicine was the motivation to create Hitler's racial state. Doctors assisted murder in several ways—implementing an adult and child “euthanasia” programme; selecting prisoners to die at Auschwitz; and conducting horrific medical experiments. It was a doctor, Dr Irmfried Eberl, who eagerly pressed the button releasing gas to exterminate mentally ill and disabled people in the Brandenburg euthanasia centre in 1940. It was a Professor of Neuropathology, Julius Hallervorden, who received the brains of Dr Eberl's murdered children, noting later that “it really wasn't my concern where they came from”. Writing “dissolves loneliness”, said Liz Berry, a poet from England's Black Country. Her poem, The Republic of Motherhood, describes the joys and vulnerabilities of this “wild queendom”, “its sorrow, its unbearable skinless beauty”. David Nott showed why surgeons working in war zones needed to be “neutral but truthful” about what they saw. And why man's inhumanity to man seemed unquenchable. Tom de Freston described his painting as a “wound” in the year of his father's death. Philip Marsden proclaimed the importance of place (a distinctive living reality) over space (an idealised abstraction) for human wellbeing. Denise Riley contested the idea of empathy, an unachievable benevolent identification. Surely kindness and solidarity were what a person needed. Sheldon Thomas addressed the root causes of gang culture: rejection, hatred, fear, depression, confusion, disillusionment, insecurity, disappointment, and anger. Lara Pawson declared the political importance of pessimism—“If you can't be angry today, when can you be angry?” Tim Dee described his recent diagnosis of Parkinson's disease and the strange connection he felt between the tremor he was now living with and the vibrating tail of a Redstart, a bird he had admired and studied his entire life. Danny Dorling fulminated at flatlining life expectancy in Britain. Stalling life expectancy was a political choice, he said. 39 307 deaths between July, 2016, and June, 2017, deaths that should not have happened. “This is a bizarre country at a bizarre time…and things are about to get very much worse.” David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, spoke about his son who has almost completely non-verbal autism. How could he understand his son? Contrary to much conventional medical thinking, his son “had access to the periodic table of human emotion”. By connecting through imagination, there was the possibility of “incandescent joy”. Translating Naoki Higashida's The Reason I Jump gave him insights into his son's way of thinking. Medicine Unboxed was created by the remarkable Sam Guglani, an oncologist based in Cheltenham. His book, Histories, was published earlier this year. There is no other event quite like it. Next year, the theme is “Love”. Be there.
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Sep 1, 2018
Mispansyah Mispansyah 
