Professor Raymond Tallis
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.4 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 25 March 2007
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the physician, philosopher, novelist and poet Professor Raymond Tallis. His specialism is the care of elderly patients - it's an area that he combines with his philosophical interest in considering what it is that makes humans unique - all part, as he says, of 'unpacking the miracle of everyday life'.
He was one of five children brought up in modest circumstances in Liverpool. A bright child, he studied at Oxford and then St Thomas' Hospital although he acknowledges that his father was always disappointed that he had become a doctor - thinking it rather a shabby profession compared to his own preference for mathematics. Throughout much of his working life he rose before dawn in order to squeeze in time for his writing before he started his clinical work and in 2000 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in recognition of his contribution to medical research.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: The first movement of String Quintet in C Major by Franz Schubert Book: Being and Time by Martin Heidegger Luxury: A video of a day in the life of his family.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 2007. My cast away this week is the physician, philosopher, poet and novelist Professor Raymond Tallis. |
| 0:34.0 | As one of Britain's foremost medical thinkers, he brings a passion to his work |
| 0:38.0 | that extends well beyond the clinical, |
| 0:40.0 | saying that most of his writing is about unpacking the miracle of everyday life. |
| 0:45.0 | Yet it's in his specialism of geriatric medicine that the subject of death |
| 0:50.0 | caused him a significant change of heart. |
| 0:53.0 | Called upon to professionally investigate assisted dying, |
| 0:56.0 | he ended up reversing his own view against it |
| 0:59.0 | and deciding that in the right circumstances, |
| 1:02.0 | patients should indeed be helped to kill themselves. |
| 1:05.4 | Your own father, Raytellis, once posed the question, what do you want to treat all those old people |
| 1:09.0 | for, everyone's got a die of something? |
| 1:11.5 | He had a point, didn't he? |
| 1:13.6 | His point was undermined by the fact that he was 92 when he asked me, and he was in receipt |
| 1:16.8 | of a lot of good medical treatment and was benefiting from it. |
| 1:20.3 | And I think in a way it's important not to think of medical care of older people |
| 1:24.4 | as being hedged around with lots of ethical problems. |
| 1:26.8 | Most medical care of older people, like the medical care of younger people, |
| 1:30.6 | actually consists of getting people back on the feet and returning to everyday life. people and if you are preoccupied with that and concerned with that, it seems interesting |
| 1:44.8 | that you didn't choose to go into, for example, obstetrics or pediatrics, areas of medicine |
... |
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