November 2024: The Prescription
Published: 1 November 2024
‘the prescription’ for creative responses to medical archive
‘the prescription’ for creative responses to medical archive
Dr Gillean McDougall on a Glasgow writers’ group
Top row, L to R : William Hume, Allan Gaw, Alison Coyle
Lower row, L to R : Sarah Smith, Gillean McDougall, Margaret McMillan
I’m a writer and editor based in Glasgow and completed my MLitt and DFA in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow in 2021. My project Writing the Asylum received funding from the University and Wellcome under the Glasgow Medical Humanities Early Career Awards scheme; writers and artists reflected on the archive of Gartnavel Royal Asylum, and you can see their work at writingtheasylum.co.uk. In 2023 my group ‘the prescription’ worked with the archive of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow to produce new writing.
In autumn 2024 we were hosted by the University’s Anatomy Museum for two workshops. Anatomy Technician Dr Ianto Jocks introduced the collection and answered many questions – after which the writers spent close time with particular items. Within our small group there’s a good balance of professional knowledge and writing experience, and the Anatomy Museum and its collection proved appealing and evocative for different reasons.
Former pathologist Allan Gaw writes poetry and is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. Here were his thoughts: ‘They say, ‘Never go back,’ don’t they? Entering the Museum after an absence of 45 years not only stirred memories of student days; it made me question what had become of me and my dreams in the intervening years. The changes I observed in the museum are a stark metaphor for my own aging, and a potent stimulus for writing about growth, fulfilment and decay. I’m developing my response in a series of poems.’
‘I’ve fallen down an eighteenth-century rabbit hole,’ says Alison Coyle, currently studying for the University’s Creative Writing MLitt. ‘Seeing the female body brutally reduced to birthing machine in the plaster casts of the gravid uterus is profoundly moving. Hearing about dissection practice through the years and its connections with the underworld prompted a piece of crime fiction set in one such museum. At a time when progress appears to have halted and women’s reproductive rights are being reduced, we owe a great deal to these unknown ladies preserved in plaster.’
The sheer volume of the exhibits is daunting initially. ‘I could have chosen any number of objects,’ says Sarah Smith, whose debut novel, Hear No Evil, was shortlisted for a number of prestigious awards and was Waterstone’s Scottish Book of the Month in February 2023. ‘In the end, I picked the Chronic Abscess of Mamma, 45.24 to generate a new writing project. I’m envisaging a scene set in the 1870s where a nurse attends a public lecture in the Anatomy Museum in the company of a surgeon. I want to set her lived experience of women’s illness alongside the detached or prurient attitudes of the audience to these organs that have been procured and suspended in jars.’
Margaret McMillan is a doctor who writes short fiction. She asked: ‘Anatomy? As a medical student you love it or hate it. I was a hater, spending tutorials in the Museum imagining the stories behind the grotesqueries in specimen jars. This time, my chosen specimen is a skull fragmented by bullet holes and labelled as that of a Russian soldier from the Battle of Balaclava. The legend says it came dirty with earth, as if exhumed. Whose was it? How did it come to be here? Who profited? The story I’m developing starts, ‘Where there’s death there’s opportunity…’
So the creative approaches range from close observation triggering historical stories to the more general appeal and impact of health archives. William Hume writes creative non-fiction and other crossover genres about what it is to be human. ‘I’m working on a humanities-style essay in response to the museum as a whole with passing reference to several specimens. It has such a long, colourful history, filled with staff and students and still in daily use. I’m thinking of the ‘Ma’ of the museum as a versatile learning and teaching space but also a pause for thinking.’
And for me? Blindness is a significant thread in my novel-in-progress, and more specifically treatment and prognosis of detached retina in the Glasgow of the early 1900s. So I was interested in eyes on these visits, asking to see some examples. Our workshop discussions ranged widely across centuries and particular illnesses and conditions, but for me the time spent with those tiny ‘wet specimens’ in their glass jars was intimate, revealing and provoking. As our creative writing goes out into the world, it has a value based in truth which is endlessly helpful both to writer and reader. These irreplaceable archives from the past allow us to better understand the human condition and mark it in the present. We’re grateful to the Anatomy Museum for the chance to visit and hope to return.
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First published: 1 November 2024