In love with death
I had one of those weeks, this week, where different experiences serendipitously come together. At the beginning of the week I read a post by Wellcome engagement fellow Richard Barnett, where he discussed the joys and concerns of featuring images of ill patients in his forthcoming book The Sick Rose. I think it is one of the best things I have ever read on the dangers of using complex images from the past.
Then, on Wednesday I was lucky enough to go to the launch of a new book In Love with Death by Satish Modi, at the Old Operating Theatre, near London Bridge. I'm ashamed to say that I'd never been to the Old Operating Theatre before, I never even knew that it existed. But, from the moment you arrive, it's a wonderful experience. You climb the steep spiral staircase up the tower of St. Thomas's, and arrive in an extraordinary space turned into a 'herb garret.' The rafter space of the museum is filled with displays evoking the history of medicine from a cabinet of curiosities complete with stuffed alligator, to a herb store, to a shiny display of forceps.
It's an eclectic - and not wholly accurate - but evocative space, perfect for the launch of a book that advocates a more holistic attitude to death. The actual launch was made in the old operating theatre itself: a 19th-century theatre complete with traditional standing spaces for students in a steep horseshoe curve, an old wooden adjustable bed for patients and a sawdust-filled box for amputated body parts. The curator of the museum, Karen Howells, gave us a lively enactment and explanation of surgery pre-anaesthetic. Mr Modi then introduced us to his book, which uses his own and other people's stories to argue for our need to embrace our inescapable death in order to live a contented life.
The Old Operating Theatre was a brilliant, quirky venue for launching such a book. In fact, I and my partner in crime were interviewed for a BBC Radio 4 programme on unusual launches (so listen out for my dulcet tones in mid-July). But the combination of the two got me thinking about why we go to such collections, and read such books, and I think it's actually for precisely opposite reasons. Collections like the OOT or the Wellcome Collection (where Barnett's images come from) are appealing partly because of the strangeness of the past, and partly for an element of schadenfreude at what happened to our unfortunate forbears. We can enjoy what now seem to be the vagaries of medical history from a safe and secure distance.
Modi's book, by contrast, argues for death as an extension of life, not something we should fight against, and something that should make us consider what we save up in life (particularly money) in different ways. It is precisely the closeness of death, it's lack of fear and difference that Modi advocates. I wonder how we'd show that in a museum?