The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
If you press this button, you will die…
In the Science Museum’s new galleries, Adam Kay finds a terrifying history of medical breakthroughs and blunders
As a medical student, back in the days when Donald Trump was just a creepy cameo in a Home Alone movie, the Science Museum was like a second home to me. My lecture theatres were next door at Imperial College and my halls of residence just across the street, so it was the perfect place to recover from the stresses of anatomy revision and the strains of heavy snakebite consumption. The plane Amy Johnson flew in 1930 from London to Australia! Charles Babbage’s 19th-century analytical engine! A clock that’s been ticking away since the 14th century!
This month, in my alternative alma mater, 3,000 artefacts from half a millennium of medical history go on permanent public display. This assortment of fascinating, bewildering and sometimes terrifying items is part of the collection of Henry Wellcome – philanthropist, father of big pharma and curio hoarder extraordinaire. Wellcome and his pal Silas Burroughs founded their drugs company in 1880 and within 50 years had discovered and developed antihistamines, antitoxins for tetanus and diphtheria, and mass-produced insulin. His many millions allowed him to indulge his obsession with collecting scientific curios. In truth, “collecting” doesn’t quite cover it – some years Wellcome spent more on acquisitions than the British Museum; his total hoard was said to be many times bigger than the Louvre’s.
The new Wellcome Galleries provide an enthralling historical context for how we experience health and medicine in the modern world. Focusing on the various attempts that people have made to understand the body – and to remedy the various ghastly ways it can malfunction – the collection features a staggering array of items; from Alexander Fleming’s original culture of penicillin (to which he initially gave the much less appetising name of “mould juice”) to the world’s first MRI scanner. But it’s not just ingenious innovations and incredible achievements that are on display. Joyfully, it’s also the great many insane contraptions and fantastical doohickeys that people came up with as they trialled and errored their way from blind ignorance to technological enlightenment.
I’ve always been obsessed with the history of medicine and it was wonderful to look at hundreds of objects that I’d only ever read about in textbooks. A trepanned skull for example. Heads from as far back as 5,000BC show evidence of exploratory drilling and, barbaric as it seems now, trepanning was essentially the neuroscience of its day. Relatively low-tech neuroscience admittedly, executed with flint, shark’s teeth and shells, but you can’t fault our early ancestors for trying.
At least they had sussed that the brain was important, something that hadn’t actually occurred to the ancient Egyptians. In many ways they were hugely advanced as a civilisation, but they did rather drop the ball when it came to the brain. In fact, they thought it was utterly useless – little more than dormant attic space. When preparing dead bodies for the afterlife as part of the mummification process they ascribed various levels of importance to different organs.
The heart would be carefully preserved and placed back within the chest. The liver was given pride of place in a jar on a nearby shelf. But the poor brain just got scooped out via the nose and tossed in the bin like hair from a clogged plughole.
The collection also features a wall full of phrenological heads. Phrenology, of course, was the Victorian pseudoscience of bump-reading. It was founded by German physician Franz Joseph Gall, who tried to convince the world that our brains had “inner senses” that shaped not only the brain, but also the skull that encased it. Furthermore, he maintained that by fondling the surface of our head-bumps, trained phrenologists could tell whether our personalities were creative, romantic or aggressive. Or more commonly, just extremely gullible.
You can also check out Broca’s goniometer. Pierre Paul Broca was a French anatomist and anthropologist, most famous for discovering Broca’s area – a part of the brain responsible for language production. He had a patient who woke up one day only able to say the word “Tan”, much like the big tree-looking chap in the Marvel
films who can only say the word “Groot”. Following this poor bloke’s death, Broca cut him up and found there was a syphilitic lesion on a part of the frontal lobe, then promptly named this area of the brain after himself. If they’re stuck for storylines in the Marvel franchise, maybe Groot could get tested for syphilis in the next instalment?
Broca’s goniometer was a device to measure the lengths and angles of the human head. Unfortunately, this was because Broca turned out to be a terrible racist who approached his work with the sole aim of proving his hypothesis that the European white male was in every way the superior human model. He was proved wrong when his own European white male brain developed a fatal haemorrhage and put a stop to his nonsense at the age of 56.
Talking of haemorrhage, there’s also a lot of blood-based paraphernalia in the Wellcome Galleries, often attesting to the fact
One resuscitation machine was designed to blow smoke inside the human rectum
The Wellcome Galleries open at the Science Museum, London SW7 on Nov 16. Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas by Adam Kay is published by Picador
that we haven’t always got it right regarding the red stuff either. Indeed, it wasn’t until the 1600s that we worked out the concept of circulation and how the heart pumps blood around the body. By “we”, I very much mean William Harvey, who cleared up all the bloody confusion in his 1629 blockbuster An Anatomical Exercise Concerning the Movement of the Heart and Blood in Animals, which you can leaf through at the Science Museum, including his famous dedication “All we know is still infinitely less than all that still remains unknown”. Annoyingly for Harvey, his exciting new theory was roundly dismissed by the scientific community, only getting revisited and accepted many decades after his own heart had stopped pumping.
Before Harvey, doctors tended to think the best thing to do with blood was to get rid of it. Witness therefore the selection of bleeding bowls on display in the galleries. These bowls were largely on the scene thanks to the Greek physician and philosopher Galen. Riding high on the success of his early discovery that the veins contain blood and not air, Galen then made a number of incorrect but very confident pronouncements that shaped medicine for the best part of the next millennium.
Such gaffes included his theory that the liver converts food into blood, which then travels to the heart in order to get heated up, before it travels to the extremities of the body where it somehow evaporates. A fever was therefore
buried beside a Frankincense tree. The trip never happened. “Robert was appalled at the idea,” Smith writes. “He succeeded in convincing Sam that I would get lost, kidnapped, or be eaten alive by wild hyenas.”
Smith’s dream was not quite as improbable as it sounds. Although most people associate Rimbaud with his teenage years as the scourge of Paris – he stopped writing poems aged 20 – Smith was fascinated by a shadowy period later in his life when, in the 1880s, he became one of the first Europeans to settle in Harar, Ethiopia (then Abyssinia), selling guns and coffee, and unsuccessfully pitching photostories to the newly founded National Geographic magazine. It followed a tempestuous few years in which he had joined (then deserted) the Dutch Army, explored the jungles of Java and become a quarry-worker in Cyprus.
“Oh arthur arthur, we are in Abyssinia Aden making love”,
Smith wrote in her ecstatic 1973 poem “Dream of Rimbaud”. Her second album, Radio Ethiopia, ended with a track called Abyssinia inspired by Rimbaud’s melancholy final telegram, sent just before his death in France, aged 37, in which he describes how he longs to return to Harar. For Smith, it rates among his most moving writing, and proves he never lost his youthful poetic talent. “He didn’t stop writing; the body of letters that he wrote contained many poetic elements,” she says. “They’re beautifully written. I think there was poetry in his travel… To me, that [telegram] was like his last poem.”
Given her enduring affection for Rimbaud, it’s fair to say Smith’s new album Mummer Love is the record she has been waiting a lifetime to make. It sets her readings of Rimbaud’s poems to field recordings made in Ethiopia as well as hypnotic new music by Philip Glass and others. It is the latest in a series of collaborations with the experimental music group Soundwalk Collective, which began when Smith found herself making small-talk with a stranger on a plane, who turned out to be Soundwalk’s founder Stephan Crasneanscki.
At 72, Smith is aware that her long-dreamed-of trip to Ethiopia might now be too “gruelling” for her, “but that’s the beauty of working with Stephan – he is a hard traveller. He goes to these sacred mountains and deserts in the heart of Ethiopia… he presents me with a landscape, a soundscape, where Rimbaud has trod. We’re a good team: I’m doing the mental travelling, and he’s doing the physical travelling.”
The bohemian New York of the Seventies that Smith describes in Just Kids today feels almost as remote as Rimbaud’s Abyssinia. “Back then I was the young poet, and all my friends were alive,” she writes in a new foreword. “Today the city is populated with benevolent ghosts.”
“Benevolent ghosts” also haunt Smith’s latest book, Year of the Monkey, her magical realist memoir of 2016, “a challenging year. My friend Sam Shepard was negotiating the effects of Lou Gehrig’s disease, Sandy [Pearlman, her former manager] was in a coma, these were two great friends of mine that I had for almost half a century.” Both have
Mummer Love and Year of the Monkey are out now. Just Kids: Illustrated Edition is published by Bloomsbury on Thurs
‘It was for [Rimbaud] that I wrote and dreamed. He became my archangel’
since died.
Does Smith ever wonder about how she will be remembered after her death? “I’m just hoping that I’ll stay healthy and live a long time so I can keep doing better work. I’m not really worried about my legacy, I’m worried about right now.”
Nonetheless, she does have one eye on posterity: “The ambition of my life is to write a great, great book… something that’s my contribution to the world, or the canon of literature. I still feel like I can do that.”
Smith doesn’t listen to much new music these days, besides the “very interesting” 17-year-old singer Billie Eilish. “I’m still listening to Hendrix, to My Bloody Valentine, to Coltrane. I’ve been listening a lot to anime soundtracks – like Ghost in the Shell – and some Moroccan music. I like to listen to music I can write to.”
It clearly helps; Smith is writing more now than at any time since the Seventies – Year of the Monkey is her seventh book this decade. “Young people,” she tells me, a note of pride in her voice, “used to bring records to my shows – now they bring books.”
Ihave meant to write about William Wordsworth for ages: not the poet, but his great-great-greatnephew, the composer, who lived from 1908 to 1988. He had the misfortune, like his near-contemporary George Lloyd, to be in the generation of Benjamin Britten; and in the post-war period when Wordsworth was at the peak of his powers, he insisted (like Lloyd) on writing melodic, tonal music rather than engaging in the radicalism that made Britten the darling of the critics. Far better-known composers, such as Vaughan Williams, Walton and Bliss, endured decline at the same time, and for similar reasons. I am far from hostile to Britten’s oeuvre; but from about the point where the critics move to adulation – from the early Fifties onwards – I find him more and more self-indulgent and indigestible, writing principally for himself and his elite circle of musical friends. That could never be said of Wordsworth.
His first symphony – now available on Lyrita in a 1968 recording of a BBC broadcast but still, I believe, awaiting a public performance – was written in 1944, and marks him out as a formidable musician. Dark and beautiful, it echoes his grief at the war raging at the time – he was a conscientious objector.
Wordsworth wrote eight symphonies in all; Lyrita have also recorded his Second, Third and Fifth. But his admirers have recently had the treat of two new CDs on Toccata, featuring superb performances by Latvia’s Liepaja Symphony Orchestra, the oldest ensemble in the Baltic states. Their conductor is
John Gibbons, who has an absolute rapport with this composer, as well as a deep understanding of the inexplicably neglected masterpieces of the English canon.
The first disc includes two hitherto unrecorded Wordsworth symphonies, the Fourth, of 1953, and the Eighth, from 1986, written two years before Wordsworth’s death. The Fourth has one continuous, breathtaking movement of diverting tunes and arresting textures, propelled by changes in tempo and rhythm. The Eighth, subtitled Pax Hominibus – “peace to mankind” – reflects his lifelong pacifism, and is in two contrasting movements. Although it was the last score Wordsworth ever wrote, there is nothing valedictory about it. The disc also contains the Divertimento of 1954 and the Variations on a Scottish Theme of 1962.
The second disc demonstrates Wordsworth’s genius with the orchestra in his Three Pastoral Sketches of 1937 – which suggest an influence of Vaughan Williams – as well as the Piano Concerto of 1946 and the Violin Concerto of 1955. Both concertos are of the highest order, but the piano is by a short head the more compelling.
The young Latvian soloist, Arta Arnicane, has an expressive urgency in the second movement that complements the darkness and drama of the playing, and often sets up a conflict with it. In the battle between soloist and orchestra, Wordsworth said he sought to show that “it is only through the individual that the mass can be tamed and redeemed.” The work, on the evidence of this performance, enters the front rank of British piano concertos, along with those of Vaughan Williams, Foulds, Ireland and Britten.
Talking of George Lloyd: Gibbons tomorrow afternoon conducts a Remembrance
Sunday concert with the Worthing Symphony Orchestra, in Worthing, that will include the first professional public performance since 1981 of Lloyd’s titanic Fourth Symphony, inspired by his service on the Arctic Convoys. If you are in the vicinity, regard it as unmissable.