Posted in from the dark room, photography on October 3, 2007| 2 Comments »
G1, originally uploaded by bobsee.
There are a couple of enormous advertising screens on the edge of George Square in Glasgow just now, and when I took this photo the other morning it had just changed to this “G1” display (which is the postcode for George Square)
This photo and the other one about the advertising banners on George Square just caught my eye.
This is one of the benefits of carrying your camera eveywhere – it helps you notice what you otherwise pass without seeing every day.
Posted in from the dark room, photography on October 3, 2007| Leave a Comment »
glasgow posters, originally uploaded by bobsee.
These gigantic banners on George Square in Glasgow caught my eye the other day.
Oh, and, yes, I rather like that phrase…..”beauty is mischief”!
Posted in education, from the consulting room, health, life, movies on October 3, 2007| Leave a Comment »
This is Part 2 in a series. You’ll find Part 1 here.
One of the major ways of creating a sense of self is through group identity. We see this especially strongly in small towns and villages where there are very real, very active communities. What I mean by that is not just people who live in the same street or same town but people who work together, play together, live together. Communities of people who share values and traditions which bond them together. I gave an example of such a community in the Part 1 of this series where I showed a clip about Hobbits. Well, hobbits are, of course, imaginary creatures, and some people find it hard to identify with fantasy so here are two clips from a movie entitled “Brassed Off”. This is an at times funny, at times tragic tale of a mining community in the north of England. It’s set in the Thatcher years when the coal mines were being closed down and these communities were being destroyed. A characteristic of these northern towns was the brass band. It was just one of the ways the community bonded. Mining towns would regularly have brass band contests – like this –
You can feel the spirit of these people and how the music, the beer and the comraderie created a cohesive, group identity.
The band leader is called Danny and in one scene he has a heart attack and as he lies, seemingly dying, in his hospital bed his band gather outside and pay their respects, by playing “Danny Boy”
Oops! I should’ve warned you to have your tissues ready! Moving, isn’t it? It’s probably the only time a brass band has moved me to tears!
Think back to the character we saw at the start of About a Boy. Can you imagine that he would have the same needs, the same desires and the same experience as these characters in this tale?
We are all different in so many ways and, in health care, to find the best treatment for someone, we have to discover who this person is who has this particular disease. Otherwise we’re probably going to fail to help them to recover.
Posted in education, from the consulting room, from the viewing room, health, life, movies on October 2, 2007| 6 Comments »
I was recently asked to give a talk at a Palliative Care Conference in Dundee. One of the organisers had seen me use movies as a educational tool when teaching doctors and wanted me to demonstrate that. It was well received and I thought I’d put up a series of posts based on the talk. I hope you like them.
TWO QUESTIONS FOR ALL DOCTORS
I think the core of a doctor’s job is to try and understand people. One thing I find helpful in that regard is to have two questions at the back of my head during every consultation –
With the first question, I’m trying to understand what’s important to the person and how they create a sense of self. I won’t go into this in much more detail just now but one well-known way of viewing the world is through the triad of body, mind and spirit. I find that quite helpful. We can consider each of these as a focus and for every one of us we can place ourselves on the this map – the body, mind, spirit map.
For the purposes of understanding where someone lives on this map, I think that the body represents the physical. These are people to whom physical security and physical reality are paramount. They prioritise material issues and they tend to prefer to have a rational, logical approach to problems – you’ve probably heard someone say “Don’t give me your touchy-feely nonsense!” when asked to discuss how they are feeling. Utility and practicality are their key values. For others, emotional security is more important. They are very aware of feelings and of relationships. They see themselves in relation to others. The third focus is spiritual and by this I mean the need to make sense of the world and the idea that there is something greater than each of us as individuals. This might be religious but it might not. What is important to that person is that they need to have a sense of purpose.
This map, by the way, is not a set of boxes into which people should be placed. The map is more like a map of three areas or neighbouring countries with flexible, moving, overlapping borders. Some people spend all their lives in only one of the countries but most move around!
This, for me, is a fundamental way of creating a sense of self – a way of answering the “who am I?” question. But related to this there is another way, which is how we see ourselves in relation to others. For all of us we live with a tension of two opposites – the need to be separate, unique, individual AND the need to belong, to love and be loved, to identify with others. I say this is related because I find that often the physically-focussed person is more towards the pole of individuality and separateness and the emotionally-focussed towards the pole of identification with others.
So take a look at this movie clip and listen the main character’s monologue. Here is a man who has a sense of being self-contained and who is materially-focussed.
“I am Ibiza!”
To see the opposite pole, have a look at this clip. Here are people whose sense of identity comes from the community –
“It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life”
These are two good examples of very different ways of experiencing the world, different sets of priorities and different ways of creating a sense of self.
OK, so some of you will be saying hobbits?? They’re not real! But, trust me, the Hugh Grant character in About a Boy isn’t real either! But let me address that in Part 2 where I’ll show a couple of clips from one of my favourite movies, Brassed Off, which is set in a Northern English mining community. You can compare that to the lifestyle of the hobbits in the Shire.
Posted in from the consulting room, from the viewing room, health, movies on October 2, 2007| 1 Comment »
I stumbled upon this news item. It’s the story of Pfizer, an $8.5 billion law-suit and the Nigerian government. It’s one of those sad tales of a drug company testing out a new drug developed in Africa. The drug concerned is Trovan and the case relates back to 1996 when an epidemic of meningitis was raging in Kano, Nigeria. Pfizer gave Trovan to 100 children and another “proven” treatment for meningitis to another 100. Nigeria alleges that the deaths of 11 children and permanent health problems of many others were the result of Pfizer’s trial. Whatever the truth of the matter, and however the trial turns out, it raises an issue which is highly contentious which is the use of poor African’s in drug trials conducted by multi-nationals. The original story was broken by the Washington Post.
Did you ever see “The Constant Gardner“?
Posted in books, from the reading room, life, philosophy on October 1, 2007| 4 Comments »
Robert C Solomon writes a lot about love in his book “The Joy of Philosophy“. In particular he argues that love is a virtue.
I am going…to defend what we now call romantic love, erotic love, as a virtue – indeed as an exemplary virtue. I want to defend what one might call enthusiasm as a virtue, the enthusiasm born of love’s attachments being the most obvious example.
and, later
The passionate attachment of one person for another is a virtue.
To love another, and to be enlivened by that love, to live a better, richer life because of that love, for love of another to be the source, the fountainhead of an enthusiastic, passionate engagement with life…….that’s the challenge. I don’t think we talk enough about this kind of love these days. In Professor Solomon’s terms we tend to think about love rather more “thinly”……we reduce it to something less than it can be.
As he says, love creates love –
Love tends to build on itself, to amplify with time, to find – through love – even more reasons to love.
Whilst it might be true that an unexamined life is not worth living, it’s even more true that a loveless life doesn’t feel worth living.
Love (or loving) itself is the virtue, a virtue so important that rationality pales in significance.
Posted in from the dark room, photography on October 1, 2007| 3 Comments »
In the hour before sunset, looking out of the window, I see this……
I decided to take a photo out of the same window every day at about the same time. I chose the hour before sunset because I’m usually back home by then and because that’s a time of day I’m always saying “Wow! Look at the sky!” HERE is a slideshow of 16 days in August/September – have a look.
Isn’t it amazing? Totally amazing just how different the same part of the world looks every day! (Actually it doesn’t just change daily of course – it’s constantly changing)
Heroes Not Zombies 