Reith Lectures – worth spending time to read or listen again

Dr Atul Gawande

Every year, since their foundation in 1948, significant international thinkers have been invited by the BBC to present a series of talks or lectures in honour of Lord Reith, the first DG of the BBC. For him, the BBC’s mission was to be a public service which enriches the intellectual and cultural life of the nation. It is in this spirit that the invitations are made to people who have both expertise and a vision to share concerning serious and important contemporary issues.

I have had the benefit this year of catching the first one of the series (aired a few weeks ago) and then being hooked, moved to tears, fascinated, by all three subsequent talks. The lectures have been given by Dr Atul Gawande, professor of medicine at Harvard; as Sue Lawley described him in front of the invited audience, “his abilities as a doctor and surgeon are complemented by his skills as a writer, thinker and political analyst, and he’s become one of the world’s leading thinkers on public health.”

He is a brilliant story-teller; he has used extraordinary stories from what has happened to family or friends to illustrate his inspiring meditations on both the fallibility of medicine, of systems, of individuals, as well as the miracles unbelievably achieved within medicine, by systems and by individuals. It has been sufficient to give you both fear and optimism about global health; he has not flinched from the difficult issues of ageing and death. His final talk, first on air this morning, repeated on Saturday, is titled The Idea of Well-being. Dr Gawande opines: “ I think we’ve been rather limited in that we think our job is to build systems of care for human existence. We think our job is to insure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being – and well-being is ultimately about sustaining the reasons one wishes to be alive.”

Each talk was followed by Q & A with the invited international audience, with further serious and important issues being flagged up and discussed.

The talks are available as transcripts for those who find it easier to absorb deep discussions by reading rather than listening, or who want to revisit Dr Gawande’s inspirational and far-sighted thinking.

For more information and to hear the talks see:  www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00729d9