PHOTO: SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY


WHAT ARE WE LOOKING AT? Bone tissue aff ected by osteoporosis


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DECEASED DERMIS Decontaminated skin from cadavers could soon be used to treat wounds in living patients, the Daily Mail reports. Manchester University researchers found decellularised skin was less likely to be rejected by a person’s body and could treat acute wounds that don’t easily heal, such as burns and ulcers.


FACIAL CLUES Patients with serious heart and lung conditions struggle with some facial expressions, particularly surprise. The Emergency Medical Journal published fi ndings which they say could help busy emergency room doctors decide who to prioritise for treatment, and who really needs “often costly and invasive tests”. Fifty patients attending for emergency care with chest pain were assessed and those with more serious problems had a signifi cantly narrower facial expression range.


MISSING BRAIN A man is suing a private cancer institute in Kentucky, USA, claiming that staff lost a piece of his brain after surgery. He was undergoing experimental treatment for a tumour in which doctors extracted a portion of brain which was later to be re-injected. But after the procedure the patient was told the tissue was lost and the treatment could not be completed. The cancer centre disputes the claim.


Pick: DVD - Critical


Created by Jed Mercurio, starring Lennie James, Catherine Walker, Peter Sullivan, Neve McIntosh; 2015


THE dominance of TV medical dramas has waned in recent years since the likes of ER and House ended, leaving mostly old (predictable) faithfuls like Casualty and Holby City. But if anyone can inject excitement back into the genre it’s writer and former hospital doctor Jed Mercurio, whose previous hits Cardiac Arrest and Bodies blazed a trail with their unfl inching portrayals of stressed-out doctors fi ghting their


way through a fl awed NHS system. Sky 1’s 13-part series Critical


continues many of these themes but takes the unique approach of focusing each episode on the care given to one patient over 60 minutes (the “golden hour”). Keeping soap opera-style personal stories to a minimum, it is set in an almost space- age looking NHS major trauma centre that is packed with hi-tech gadgets and some startlingly realistic surgical


scenes. After an oddly uninvolving fi rst


episode, Lennie James’ Army trauma surgeon Glen Boyle swaggers on the scene in episode two, going head- to-head with the targets-obsessed trauma chief (Sullivan), taking bold clinical decisions, and trying to whip his team into shape, all while confronting his past with old fl ame Fiona (Walker). A tense, exciting and entertaining ride.


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WHAT ARE WE LOOKING AT? Stumped? The answer is at the bottom of the page


Book Review: Adventures in Human Being Profi le Books: £14.99 hardback


Review by Jim Killgore, publications editor, MDDUS


“AS a child I didn’t want to be a doctor, I wanted to be a geographer,” writes Gavin Francis in the fi rst line of the prologue to his new book Adventures in Human Being. It is almost by way of explanation as to why the author and GP would follow two popular travel adventures – fi rst in the arctic (True North) and then as a resident medic on a remote British ice station (Empire Antarctica) – with a fascinating riff on human anatomy and medicine.


Here Francis turns his


geographer’s eye inward on a “journey through the most intimate landscape of all: our own bodies”. In a series of linked essays ordered from head to toe “like certain anatomy texts” Francis explores how culture “continually reshapes the ways we imagine and inhabit the body”. It is both an eclectic collection of medical curiosities as well as a thoughtful account of his own encounters with the human landscape in his varied career as a doctor. Starting in chapter one he describes fi rst attending neuroanatomy lab as a student (“forty brains in buckets”) and fi nding the pineal body which Descartes described as the “seat of the soul” – that leading into an account of his later training


severe intractable epilepsy. So it goes with each part of the body: an account of how Leonardo da Vinci’s meticulous drawings of facial muscles in cadavers echoed his earlier appreciation of human expression as captured in his painting of The Last Supper, or an accident leading to a consideration of shoulder injury as depicted by Homer in the fall of Troy. The broad sweep of the


observing a neurosurgeon mapping “eloquent” tissue on the surface of the brain to preserve speech function in a woman undergoing a procedure to treat


material is subtly handled and never feels over intellectual. It can also be quite funny. In one chapter, Francis asks an A&E patient with a smashed fi st of questionable origin: “What’s your job?” “I’m a pickpocket,” he says with a wry smile, “what’s it to you?” To which Francis replies: “Just


checking you weren’t a concert pianist.”


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