JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
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JONATHAN TAYLOR is moved by the plea to replace mechanistic medicine with a ‘narrative’ approach based on imagination and humanity
BEST OF BOTH WORLDS: Cardiologist Juan Manuel Romero at a hospital in Ciudad Obregon in Sonora, Mexico, takes part in pre-op consultation with a patient and her doctor 400 miles away in La Paz, Baja California. Telemedicine does help deliver care to patients in rural and remote locations across Mexico.
RON JACOBS welcomes the translation into English of an angry cry from the place they call the periphery
GUILLERMO THOMAS recommends a useful book aimed at informing activists with local examples of solidarity in action around the world
HENRY BELL is provoked by a book that looks toward, but does not fully explore the question of who gets to imagine the shapes of cities to come
MATTHEW HAWKINS surveys the upcoming programme of contemporary dance in Glasgow, and picks some highlights
‘Chance encounters are what keep us going,’ says novelist Haruki Murakami. In Amy, a chance encounter gives fresh perspective to memories of angst, hedonism and a charismatic teenage rebel.
Oliver Sacks, Letters,
ed. Kate Edgar, Picador, £30
THROUGHOUT his life, the great neurologist Oliver Sacks emphasised the human aspect of medical practice.
Often faced with the most debilitating and apparently dehumanising conditions, Sacks demanded that doctors stopped seeing their patients as “bodies” and instead met them as “human beings”: “We must come down from our position as ‘objective observers’,” he wrote in his famous work Awakenings (1973), “and meet our patients face-to-face; we must meet them in a sympathetic and imaginative encounter.”
This ideal of medical practice runs as a kind of refrain, or perhaps on-going quest, throughout Sacks’s fascinating Selected Letters, brilliantly edited and contextualised by Kate Edgar. Over and over, he rails against the dominant mechanical models of diagnosis, seeking to replace them with something more human.
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