Medical topics from different viewpoints

Press, 2 June 1982, Page 22

Medical topics from different viewpoints

“The Body in Question” starting on One on Friday at 9.45 p.m., is neither a history of medicine nor a medical part-work. It is a series of television essays, in each of which Jonathan Miller chooses a medical topic and looks at it from different viewpoints. Diagnosis' and treatment, physiology, psychology, history and philosophy all throw light on some aspect of the body. , The programme style varies throughout the series, and includes humour, drama, metaphor and analogy, music and painting, graphic design and location filming in the United Kingdom and abroad, all of which combine with Jonathan Miller’s fluent exposition to tell many in-

terestmg stones. Jonathan Miller explains: “Talking to friends, I began to realise that there was a paradoxical gap in their knowledge of the physical world and that the thing that they tended to know least about,was that part of the world that is nearest to them /- the one that moves around with them wherever they go. “I had always believed that there was an interesting and engaging way of conveying the majestic complication of the human physique. Not by giving the latest facts in modern scientific research — all that is done very successfully by scientific journalism and by medical television. “What I wanted to talk

abqut were the principles and the assumptions which form the basis of a medical student’s training, the broad ideas which make modern research ■ intelligible. To some extent my eagerness to do this was prompted by a growing interest in the occult and the irrational which has always struck me as a blasphemous indifference to the mystery of the physical creation.” In the first episode, “Naming of Parts,” by using a “magic map of the galaxy,” Jonathan Miller sets out to establish what happens when we fall ill. . “The Body in Question” was produced by Patrick Uden and directed for the 8.8. C. by Jonathan Crane and Fisher Dilke.