The Craft of Surgery

Sam Gallivan examines the similarities between surgery and sculpture.

Sam is an orthopaedic surgeon, and in this talk takes us into the operating theatre to experience how it sounds, and how it feels. And it's the sense of feeling - of drilling into a bone or cutting through a ligament - where she finds unexpected similarities between surgery and sculpture. What, she asks, can each learn from the other? And how might this sense of surgery as a craft challenge the dominant way of seeing the medical world? After all, she reasons, 'to accept surgery as a craft is to accept that there are unexpected ways of knowing in medicine that we might not be able to pin down in numbers or statistics.'

Producers: Giles Edwards and Peter Snowdon.