Gavin Francis - 5. Juni

Copyright 2018 by Gavin Francis

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Basic Books

Hachette Book Group

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First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Profile Books Ltd

First US Edition: June 2018

Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Basic Books name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.

Published in association with Wellcome Collection

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London NW1 2BE

www.wellcomecollection.org

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Library of Congress control number: 2018938201

ISBNs: 978-1-5416-9752-2 (hardcover); 978-1-5416-9751-5 (ebook)

E3-20180503-JV-PC

1. 2. Werewolves
   Agitation at the Full Moon
2. 3. Conception
   The First and Second Reason for Existing
3. 4. Sleep
   The Chamber of Dreams
4. 5. Bodybuilding
   Unhelmed by Fury
5. 6. Scalp
   Of Horns, Terror and Glory
6. 7. Birth
   Reshaping the Heart
7. 8. Rejuvenation
   An Alchemy of Youth and Beauty
8. 9. Tattooing
   The Art of Transformation
9. 10. Anorexia
   The Enchantment of Control
10. 11. Hallucination
    A Sphere of Devils
11. 12. Puberty
    Suddenly Accelerated Youth
12. 13. Pregnancy
    The Most Meticulous Work
13. 14. Gigantism
    Two Giants of Turin
14. 15. Gender
    The Two Lives of Tiresias
15. 16. Jetlag
    The Brain that Holds the Sky
16. 17. Bonesetting
    An Algebra of Healing
17. 18. Menopause
    Third Face of the Goddess
18. 19. Castration
    Hope, Love and Sacrifice
19. 20. Laughter
    Some Eminency in Ourselves
20. 21. Prosthetics
    Humanity 2.0
21. 22. Memory
    Palaces of Forgetting
22. 23. Death
    The Celebration of Life

True North: Travels in Arctic Europe

Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence and Emperor Penguins

Adventures in Human Being

WELLCOME COLLECTION is a free museum and library that aims to challenge how we think and feel about health. Inspired by the medical objects and curiosities collected by Henry Wellcome, it connects science, medicine, life and art. Wellcome Collection exhibitions, events and books explore a diverse range of subjects, including consciousness, forensic medicine, emotions, sexology, identity and death.

Wellcome Collection is part of Wellcome, a global charitable foundation that exists to improve health for everyone by helping great ideas to thrive, funding over 14,000 researchers and projects in more than seventy countries.

wellcomecollection.org

For lifes optimists,

who see hope in human change

LECTOR INTENDE, LAETABERIS

Mankind

N. human race, human species, human kind, human

nature; humanity.

human being; person, individual, mortal, body.

Adj. human, mortal, personal, individual, social.

Change

N. alteration, mutation, variation, modification,

metastasis, deviation, turn, evolution, revolution,

transformation, transfiguration; metamorphosis.

V. alter, vary; modulate, turn, shift, veer, shuffle, swerve,

deviate.

transform, transfigure, metamorphose.

My aim is to sing of the ways bodies change, ceaselessly transforming into other forms.

Ovid, Metamorphoses (c. 8 CE )

All things change with time, and we change with them.

Lothar, Holy Roman Emperor (c. 840)

And then I, a woman, by a flick of Fortunes hand was transformed into a man.

Christine de Pizan, The Mutation of Fortune (1403)

We are nothing but a bundle or collection of different sensations and are in a perpetual flux and movement.

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)

It is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

Metamorphosis governs natural phenomena reflects the shifting character of knowledge and attitudes to the human.

Marina Warner, Ovidian Metamorphosis in Contemporary Art (2009)

THIS BOOK IS A SERIES OF STORIES about medicine and the changing human body. Just as physicians must honour the privileged access they have to our bodies, they must honour the trust with which we share our stories. Even as long as two and a half thousand years ago that obligation was recognised: the Hippocratic Oath insists whatsoever in the course of practice you see or hear that ought never to be published abroad, you will not divulge. As a doctor who is also a writer Ive spent a great deal of time deliberating over that use of ought, considering what can and cannot be said without betraying the confidence of my patients.

The reflections that follow are all grounded in events within my clinical experience, but the patients in them have been so disguised as to be unrecognisable any similarities that remain are coincidental. Protecting confidences is an essential part of what I do: confidence means with faith we are all patients sooner or later; we all want faith that well be heard, and that our privacy will be respected.

From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

THERES A PARK near my medical office lined with cherry trees and elms that undergo beautiful annual transformations. If theres time on my commute Ill stop at a bench and watch them for a few moments. Winter brings storms, and the last few years have seen several of the tallest elms blown over. When they fall down, tearing up their roots, deep coffin-sized gashes open in the earth. Around Easter the branches thicken with a green so enchanting I see why some imagine it as the colour of heaven. The blossoming of the cherry trees in spring strews the grass with petals, and to take a stroll beneath their branches is to be fted in pink. The summer air feels ripe and dense barbecues are lit and babies play on rugs in the shade; acrobats teeter over ropes strung between the tree trunks. But my favourite season is autumn, when the sky feels high, the air pellucid and brittle, and heaps of crimson, auburn and gold gather around my feet. Ive been appreciating this park for around twenty-five years its adjacent to the medical school where I trained.