Morals versus medicine
IN the early scenes of MY BABY’S LIFE: WHO DECIDES? (C4) we saw the Clinical Ethics Committee at Southampton Children’s Hospital meeting to discuss the seriously ill young patients. It seemed old-fashioned, in this place of machines and cutting-edge know-how, to have decisions made in this way – a lawyer, a philosopher and a vicar sitting down with medics to discuss the morals.
Actually, as this brave documentary went on to prove, there’s even more need for these panels as medicine advances.
The technology exists to prolong life in ways not possible even a decade ago but should we always do something just because we can?
Where seriously unwell children are concerned, should parents have to make those decisions alone? The father of one-year-old Tallulah made a powerful point. His child had lived her life in hospital, unable to breathe unaided, her movement restricted by tubes.
There had been times where she’d not been expected to survive but she had. She was a smiling, happy girl, flourishing in the love of her mum and dad. She’d have been dead five years ago, her dad said. Who knew what medicine might do for her in another five years?
It was a point the committee seemed to agree with, though it was hard to tell. Sometimes you felt their tangled speeches reflected the emotional turmoil they were in.
“For me,” said surgeon Rob, “she wouldn’t even cross the threshold of even thinking about applying to say… we don’t think this child’s quality life is insufficient for her to bear the burden of the treatment.” (That was a thumbs-up, I think.)
For them, of course, there was a bigger picture. Caring for just one child like Talullah costs the NHS between a quarter and half a million pounds a year. In spreadsheet terms, 60 per cent of the resources go to 20 per cent of the patients, the same 20 per cent with the thinnest chances of long life. They also had to consider quality of life now, and simple compassion.
Sometimes, the team who sat down with the family of eightmonth-old Mimi looked on the verge of breaking down themselves. It was an unusual case for the staff, because, technically, they felt they could keep this baby alive.
The parents didn’t want it, though, and they needed support in making the decision. The raw grief of Mimi’s family and the quiet, authentic kindness of the medics made for powerful viewing, sometimes too much to bear.
Last night’s instalment of CIVILISATIONS (BBC2) took the subject of landscape painting as its path through the human soul.
It’s easy to dismiss nature scenes as decoration but as presenter Simon Schama showed, every picture tells a story. Chinese landscapes, mountains beetling over tiny villages, were deployed by the 10th century Sung Dynasty to depict a state of harmony and order after years of war.
Three centuries later, Wang Meng turned the idea on its head. You could say there’s not much happening in his famous Dwelling in the Qingbian Mountains but the familiar peaks have become threatening, humans seem lost in the bewildering pathways.
Even the artist’s jabbing brushstrokes communicate his anxiety, as a rebel who’d refused to serve the Mongol overlords and knew he was on borrowed time.
Schama, that Old Master of soundbites, summed it up marvellously. “State of mind, rather than state of mountain.”