Books to Make You Better
Thursday 8 November, 19.00-20.30
At some point, we have all felt the power of literature to affect our mood, but can you read yourself well? The written word can influence us far beyond the moment of reading. Literature can transform lives. Writers and their readers know this. Doctors are beginning to apply it. In 2004 the UK rolled out its first bibliotherapy programme through GPs clinics in Devon and Wales.
Should writers aim to heal? Do we self-diagnose through our choice of reading? What are the side-effects of storytelling and does the remedy last? This event discussed the growing interest in bibliotherapy and the part writers and readers can play in the health of the nation.
Speakers
Jane Davis, Director, University of Liverpool Reader Centre
Blake Morrison, award-winning novelist, poet and playwright
Facilitator
Raymond Tallis, Emeritus Professor of Geriatric Medicine, Manchester University; poet, and philosopher
This was the third in a series of four events exploring medicine and literature.
Other events:
• 'The Patient’s Tale', Thursday 13 September
• 'Doctor as Scribe', Thursday 11 October
• 'Medblogs and Power of the Net', Thursday 13 December
Jane Davis
I am the Director of the University of Liverpool Reader Centre. I was awarded a BA Hons (First Class) in English, followed by a PhD - 'Visionary Realism' - from Liverpool in 1987. I taught English literature, and particularly the practice of reading, to undergraduates and continuing education students for 15 years before launching the Reader Centre in 1997. I am driven by the belief that literature holds useful human value for everyone and my mission in life is to get great books out of the university, away from courses and syllabi and into the hands, minds and hearts of the general population.
Blake Morrison
I was educated at the University of Nottingham and University College London. I worked for 'The Times Literary Supplement' between 1978 and 1981 and was then literary editor for both the 'Observer' and the 'Independent on Sunday'. I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, former Chairman of the Poetry Book Society and a member of the Literature Panel of the Arts Council of England. My non-fiction books include 'And When Did You Last See Your Father?' (1993), an honest and moving account of my father's life and death, and 'As If' (1997), about the trial of the two young boys convicted of killing the toddler James Bulger in Liverpool in 1993. Most of my writing explores the perennial themes of love, childhood, memory and loss. But as the son of two GPs, I'm fascinated by the connections between art and healing.
Raymond Tallis
I trained as a doctor at the University of Oxford and St Thomas's Hospital, qualifying in 1970. Between 1987 and 2006 I was Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester and a consultant physician in Health Care of the Elderly in Salford. In March 2006 I became a full-time writer, though I remain Visiting Professor at St George's Hospital Medical School, University of London.
Over the last 20 years I have published fiction, three volumes of poetry, and over a dozen books on the philosophy of mind, philosophical anthropology, literary theory, the nature of art and cultural criticism.
