“Spending so much time with a patient who's dead gives you more appreciation for the living.”
Throughout the history of medicine, a would-be doctor’s first visit to the Anatomy Laboratory has been a much-anticipated rite of passage, an encounter with the dead that initiates them into an ancient profession. By systematically dissecting the body of a deceased donor, students construct their own professional identity, learning from the dead how to treat their future patients. This performance-talk at the Old Operating Theatre conveys thoughts and feelings of present-day medical students towards their ‘silent teacher’ - the anxiety and awe, fear and fascination, the ethical and existential challenges. Join performance scholar, Dr Alex Mermikides, Chimera theatre company and Anatomy staff and students from King’s College London to learn about dissection today and to debate its relevance for patients and the public.
Dr Alex Mermikides
Alex is the D'Oyly Carte Senior Lecturer in Arts and Health in the medical school at King’s College London. With her theatre company, Chimera, she devises performances about medical experience. Her publications include Performance, Medicine and the Human, Performance and the Medical Body and the Routledge Companion for Performance and Medicine. Her work has featured in The Guardian, Times Higher Educational Supplement, Nature Immunology and on This Week (BBC Radio 4).
Timings
5.45 PM: Doors open to the public.
Event starts at 6PM and ends at 8.30PM
Housed in the attic of the early eighteenth-century church of the old St Thomas’ Hospital, The Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret offers a unique insight into the history of medicine and surgery. The original timber framed Herb Garret was once used to dry and store herbs for patients’ medicines and in 1822 an operating theatre was included. Predating anaesthetics and antiseptics, it is the oldest surviving surgical theatre in Europe.