Medicine Unboxed

Mark Taubert, Clinical Director, Consultant Physician & Honorary Senior Lecturer in Palliative Medicine at Cardiff University School of Medicine, talks to Sam Guglani about death, sadness, pain and loss in his work as a palliative care doctor, and about his own experience of - and feelings about - death. Mark founded TalkCPR and has a national lead role to improve public understanding on topics relevant to care in the last years of life and at the extreme ends of medicine. He has written about palliative care in The Washington Post, The Guardian, Quillette, Chicago Tribune, The Times, The Independent, The Big Issue, BBC News & HuffPost UK and appeared on BBC’s Horizon, ITV's BAFTA-winning Hospital of Hope. He has also engaged in cultural collaborations to promote debate about palliative care including ‘The Colours’, a West End show in London's Soho Theatre, a National Theatre Wales' production ‘As Long As The Heart Beats’ and has talked at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, at Hay Literary Festival and the Science Museum in London. He featured in two palliative care themed recordings for the BBC Listening Project and his posthumous letter to David Bowie, which discussed the importance of good end of life care, went viral and has been made into a touring classical music composition and has been publicly read by, amongst others, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jarvis Cocker in locations including New York, London, Hay-on-Wye, Edinburgh and Berlin. Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. https://realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/

Sam Guglani talks to journalist, essayist and literary critic Mark O’Connell, author of ‘To Be a Machine’ (Granta 2017, winner of the Wellcome Prize) and ‘Notes from An Apocalypse:  A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back’ (Granta, 2020). ‘To Be a Machine’ explores transhumanism - using machines to optimise human cognition and extend human life, and the Silicon Valley belief that the human body is an outmoded device. For advocates of transhumanism, death is ‘wrong’ - an idea which at first seems difficult but as Sam and Mark discuss, ‘the body as machine’ is not so far from the assumptions that underlie all modern medicine. Mark says “It’s both wrong and right to say we are machines - but we are not just machines. It’s a metaphor and the idea that we are spiritual is also just a metaphor. It all just reduces to language.” Mortality, what it means to be embodied, our experience of time, and how we view ourselves in relation to nature, and love - and if they are reducible to the mechanistic conceptions of the transhumanists - are topics discussed by Mark and Sam in this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES. “What else could it be about but love…you could argue that the meaning of life is simply to reproduce,” says Mark, “but that’s another way of talking about love.” Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. https://realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/ Image Richard Gilligan/LA Times https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-04-14/mark-oconnell-notes-from-an-apocalypse-intervew

Samantha Harvey is Reader in creative writing at Bath Spa University and is the author of four novels, 'The Wilderness', 'All Is Song', 'Dear Thief' and 'The Western Wind', and of a memoir, published in January 2020,  'The Shapeless Unease'. Her novels have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, the Walter Scott Prize and the James Tait Black Prize, and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Baileys Prize, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize and the HWA Gold Crown Award. The Wilderness was the winner of the AMI Literature Award and the Betty Trask Prize, and The Western Wind won the 2019 Staunch Book Prize. In this episode, Samantha talks to Sam Guglani about ‘The Shapeless Unease’ and how an intense and disturbing experience of insomnia drove her writing and resulted in a book which was “fragmented and disjointed in terms of interest, subjects, tone, voice and register”. As Samantha says, unease is “something that runs deep in you and somehow comes into contact with your sense of self. I tried to find something that was causing my insomnia, to try and decode it…I was deep in this knot of suffering but thought ‘how can I keep finding the most perfect, apt and succinct way of expressing this…writing is the most joyous and liberating thing in the world.’” Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. https://realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/ Image: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/books/review/samantha-harvey-shapeless-unease.html

In this episode of Medicine Unboxed: VOICES, Sam Guglani talks to Jenn Ashworth, author of 'A Kind of Intimacy',  'Fell' and most recently 'Notes Made While Falling'. In this discussion, Jenn talks to Sam about her encounters with doctors as a child raised in a Mormon community and about the role of fiction in her understanding of the world and of illness. Jenn talks about her experience of becoming ill after the birth of her child, her feeling that she was “too ill to even want healing... to imagine that was even possible” and how she translated this into her writing. “My writing changed through being ill. Previously I wanted to use writing to speak, to communicate…afterwards it’s more about listening, a process by which I shed my layers, my armour, my certainty, my expertise - and let the world get me.” Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/

Sam Guglani talks to Professor Dame Sue Black OBE about her early childhood experiences, how they shaped her future career and about how important her teachers have been to her - and why we have a duty to let others who have changed our lives know the impact they have had on us. Sue talks about how forensic anthropology is changing, about her work in identifying perpetrators of child sexual abuse and in war crimes investigations and about hope, optimism and how she maintains objectivity when faced with the effects of human cruelty. “Even in the most awful situations,” she says, “you can find something that says humanity is better than this.” Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/ Image credit: BBC.

Richard Horton is Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet. He was born in London and is half Norwegian. He qualified in physiology and medicine from the University of Birmingham in 1986 and joined The Lancet in 1990, moving to New York as North American Editor in 1993. Richard was the first President of the World Association of Medical Editors and he is a Past-President of the US Council of Science Editors. He has a strong interest in global health and medicine’s contribution to our wider culture. He now works to develop the idea of planetary health – the health of human civilizations and the ecosystems on which they depend. In this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES, recorded before COVID-19, in a wide-ranging discussion Richard talks to Sam Guglani about his roots and formative experiences - and more recently his own illness - about the value of cooperative behaviour, about scientific publication, trust and politics, and the role of medicine as a global force for good. In a statement that prefigures the current crisis Horton says: “Every successful species has been successful not because they have tried to compete with one another and tear each other apart, but because at profound moments of stress in their evolutionary history they have cooperated”. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/

Deborah Bowman is Professor of Ethics and Law at St George's, University of London. In this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES, Deborah talks to Sam Guglani about ethics, law and the tensions between them in the context of medical ethics and about her own experience of illness. Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/

Kit de Waal has received numerous awards for her writing including the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize 2014 and 2015, the SI Leeds Literary Reader's Choice Prize 2014 and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Her first novel, 'My Name is Leon', was published in 2016 and shortlisted for the Costa Book Award. In this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES, Kit speaks with Sam Guglani about My Name is Leon and about childhood pain, loss, humanity and compassion, about 'embracing the grey' of right and wrong and about the role of literature and knowledge.  Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/

Richard Holloway was Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church. He is the award-winning author of On Forgiveness, Looking in the Distance, Godless Morality, Doubts and Loves, Between the Monster and the Saint and Leaving Alexandria. In this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES, Richard speaks with Sam Guglani about ageing, his draw to and ambivalence around religion, the shared human capacity for cruelty, the vital duty towards kindness, and the possibility of hope. Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. https://realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/

Sarah Perry is the award-winning author of three novels—After Me Comes the Flood, The Essex Serpent and Melmoth. Her work interrogates matters of faith, science and human suffering, and she is an extraordinary storyteller. In this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES, Sarah speaks with Sam Guglani about her own encounter with illness and medicine, the value of fiction, the vagaries of moral judgment, and the presence of mystery in the pursuit of knowledge. Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. https://realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/

Danny Dorling is a social geographer and is the Halford Mackinder Professorship in Geography in Oxford. He has studied and published extensively on issues concerning housing, health, employment, education and poverty. His collaborative work on the Worldmapper project has resulted in collection of world maps or ‘cartograms’, where territories are re-sized according to a subject of interest, for instance, inequality. In this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES, Danny speaks with Sam Guglani about social inequality, personal and political responses to it, and its profound impact on the health and wellbeing of societies. Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. https://realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/

Max Porter is an English writer, formerly a bookseller and editor, best known for his critically acclaimed debut Grief is the Thing with Feathers. Prior to his writing career, Porter managed the Chelsea branch of Daunt Books and won the Bookseller of the Year Award in 2009. He was Editorial Director at Granta and Portobello Books until 2019.

Richard Holloway, FRSE is a Scottish writer, broadcaster and cleric. He was Bishop of Edinburgh from 1986 to 2000 and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church from 1992 to 2000.

Eley Williams is a British writer. Her debut collection of prose, Attrib. and Other Stories (Influx Press, 2017)was awarded the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize 2018. She teaches at Royal Holloway, University of London and supervises Jungftak, a journal for contemporary prose poetry.

Bruce Miller is a palliative care specialist at UCSF and executive director of San Francisco's Zen Hospice Project.

Satish Kumar is an Indian British activist and editor. He has been a Jain monk, nuclear disarmament advocate, pacifist and is the current editor of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine.

Helen Jukes is a writer, writing tutor and beekeeper. Her writing has appeared in many publications, including Caught by the River, BBC Wildlife, Resurgence, the Junket and LITRO. She tutors on the creative writing programme at Oxford University, and also works with the Bee Friendly Trust, a London-based charity founded by beekeeper Luke Dixon to promote our understanding of honeybees and help nurture sustainable habitats.

Jason Barker is an actor and director, known for A Deal with the Universe (2018), Silly Girl (2016) and Boys on Film 18: Heroes (2018).

Preti Taneja teaches writing in prisons and universities. Her novel We That Are Young (Galley Beggar) won the 2018 Desmond Elliot Prize for the year's best debut.

Mark G. Thomas is a human evolutionary geneticist, Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at the Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London.

Eley Williams is a British writer. Her debut collection of prose, Attrib. and Other Stories (Influx Press, 2017)was awarded the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize 2018. She teaches at Royal Holloway, University of London and supervises Jungftak, a journal for contemporary prose poetry.

Havi Carel is a professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol. Her research interests include philosophy of medicine, phenomenology, philosophy of death, epistemic injustice and health, illness, and children, and film and philosophy. Carel is best-known for her work on the phenomenology of somatic illness.

Daniel Trilling is a British journalist, editor and author. He is the editor of New Humanist magazine.

Raymond Tallis is a philosopher, poet, novelist, cultural critic and a retired medical physician and clinical neuroscientist. Iona Heath was president of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) from 2009–2012.

Will Eaves is a novelist, poet and teacher. He was Arts Editor of the Times Literary Supplement and is Associate Professor in the Writing Programme at the University of Warwick.

Daniel Locke is an artist and graphic novelist. His most recent graphic novel Out of Nothing, was published in November 2017 by Nobrow Press. Daniel’s work is featured in many anthologies of contemporary comics, and in 2016 his novella Pneuma was published in the USA by Tinto Press.

Tom de Freston is an artist based in Oxford. His practice is dedicated to the construction of multimedia worlds, combining paintings, film and performance into immersive visceral narratives.

John Danaher holds is a lecturer in law at NUI Galway (Ireland). His research interests are eclectic, ranging broadly from philosophy of religion to legal theory, with particular interests in human enhancement and neuroethics.

Jessie Greengrass published a collection of short stories called, An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It in 2015. It won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize.

Roger Kneebone directs the Imperial College Centre for Engagement and Simulation Science. The Centre's aim is to advance human health through simulation, collaborating closely with clinicans, scientsts, patients, publics and experts outside medicine.

Stella Duffy OBE is a writer and theatremaker.

Zaffar Kunial is a British poet born in Birmingham, who currently lives in Shipley, Yorkshire. His mother was English and his father, who has since moved to Lahore, is from Kashmir.

Sarah Moss is an English writer & academic. She has published 6 novels as well as a number of non-fiction works and academic texts. Her work has been nominated three times for the Wellcome Book Prize.

Dr Elyan qualified in medicine from Bristol University and obtained further medical experience in the West Country. His oncology training was at Cambridge and Manchester where he did a research degree through the Paterson Institute and the Royal Marsden Hospital in London as a Senior Registrar.

Philip Marsden is an English travel writer and novelist. He was elected as a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature in 1996. He is a Trustee of the Royal Academy of Arts Development Trust.

MAPS - Tom De Freston - PAINT by Medicine Unboxed

Denise Riley is the author of the poetry collections 'Marxism for Infants', the volume 'No Fee' with Wendy Mulford, 'Dry Air', ' Stair Spirit', 'Mop Georgette', 'Selected Poems' and most recently 'Say Something Back', which was nominated for a Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection. Her chapbook, 'Time Lived, Without Its Flow' is a meditation on time after the sudden death of a child. A sequence of 20 short poems from the chapbook, titled 'A Part Song', was published in the London Review of Books and won a Forward Poetry Prize for Best Single Poem.

Caspar Henderson is the author of 'The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary' which was shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science books and for which he received the Author’s Foundation Roger Deakin Award 2009 and The Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non Fiction 2009. His latest book, 'A New Map of Wonders: A Journey in Search of Marvels' will be published by Granta in November 2017. He has been a journalist and editor with various publications and broadcasters. He is a past recipient of an IUCN-Reuters award for best environmental reporting in Western Europe. He has worked as a consultant and advisor with leading voluntary organisations, government and international agencies. He co authored 'Our Fragile Earth' (New Internationalist, 2005) and was the commissioning editor for 'Debating Globalization' (Polity, 2005).

Sarah Perry was born in Essex in 1979. She has a PhD in creative writing from Royal Holloway, and has been the Writer in Residence at the Gladstone Library and the UNESCO World City of Literature Writer in Residence in Prague. Her first novel, 'After Me Comes the Flood', was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Folio Prize, and won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award in 2014. Het second book, 'The Essex Serpent' was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2017, chosen as Waterstones Book of the Year 2016, awarded Book of the Year and Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards 2017 and longlisted for the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

Medicine Unboxed 2018: MAPS. The world’s sheet, or its shroud, the lanes of a face etched in it. Or words, all of them, all knowledge, the found and lost truth of things, grid lines of metaphor, particles of us or is it waves? - rising and falling onto a brief shore of land. Measurements fail even now of your body, its contours and margin, where its meaning lies, our picture an opening of pure fractal, an unfolding view of coast. What is the unfathomable distance to another person, another place, the invisible track of starlings in murmuration, the wayward trail of your heartbeat on paper, its luck?

Laurence Rees is a former Head of BBC TV History Programmes. For the last twenty-five years he written books and made documentaries about the Second World War and the Third Reich. His work includes 'Nazis: a Warning from History' (1997); 'War of the Century' (1999); 'Horror in the East' (2001); 'Auschwitz, the Nazis and the 'Final Solution'' (2005); 'World War Two: Behind Closed Doors' (2008) and 'The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler (2012)'. His ninety-minute feature length documentary, 'Touched by Auschwitz', transmitted on BBC2 in 2015. His latest book, 'the Holocaust: A New History', was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and described as "the finest single volume account of the Holocaust" by The Daily Telegraph.

Liz Berry's debut collection, Black Country (Chatto & Windus, 2014), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, received a Somerset Maugham Award, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2014. Black Country was chosen as a book of the year by The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Mail, The Big Issue and The Morning Star. Liz’s poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio, television and recorded for the Poetry Archive. She has been a judge for major prizes including The Forward Prizes for Poetry and Foyle Young Poets. Liz works as a tutor for The Arvon Foundation, Writer’s Centre Norwich and Writing West Midlands. Mona Arshi is a poet and lawyer. Her poem 'Hummingbird' won first prize in the Magma Magazine poetry competition in 2012. She also was one of the Competition winners for the World Events Young Artists Festival in September 2012. She was also an award winner in the Troubadour International Competition for her poem ‘Bad day in the Office’. In 2014, she was joint winner of the Manchester Creative Writing Competition. A portfolio of her poems appeared in TEN-THE NEW WAVE in 2014 by Bloodaxe books. Mona’s poetry has been published widely in magazines including Poetry Review, Magma, Rialto and the Sunday Times. Her début collection of poem ‘Small Hands’ was published by Liverpool University in 2015 and won the Forward Prize for best first collection. Mona was one of ten poets selected for the ‘Complete Works’, a national development programme funded by the Arts Council.

Danny Dorling is the co-author of more than a dozen books on issues related to social inequalities in Britain and has published several hundred journal papers. His work concerns issues of housing, health, employment, education and poverty. Danny was employed as a play-worker in children’s summer play-schemes. He learnt the ethos of pre-school education where the underlying rationale was that playing is learning for living. He tries not to forget this. He is an Academician of the Academy of the Learned Societies in the Social Sciences, Honorary President of the Society of Cartographers and a patron of Roadpeace, the national charity for road crash victims.

Eimear McBride is the author of 'A Girl is a Half-formed Thing', her debut novel that won the 2013 Goldsmiths Prize, was shortlisted for the 2014 Folio Prize and won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2014. Her second book 'The Lesser Bohemians' was published in 2016.

Lara Pawson is the author of 'This Is The Place To Be', a fragmentary memoir which was published in September 2016 with CB editions. It is based on the long looping monologue, Non Correspondence, which was directed by Forced Entertainment’s Tim Etchells and performed by Cathy Naden at the Battersea Arts Centre for the London International Festival of Theatre 2014, After A War. In the 'Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre' (IB Tauris, 2014) was her first book. It was nominated for several awards and longlisted for The Orwell Prize 2015. It was translated as 'Em Nome Do Povo: O massacre que Angola silenciou' (Ediçôes Tinta da China, 2014). Her commentary, essays and reviews have been published in many places, most recently in the Times Literary Supplement, Verso, New Humanist and ArtReview. As well as making many programmes for the BBC, Lara has participated in numerous radio and television programmes in London, Lisbon, Luanda and Johannesburg.

Tim Dee was born in Liverpool in 1961. He has worked as a BBC radio producer for twenty years and divides his life between Bristol and Cambridge. He is the author of THE RUNNING SKY (2009) and FOUR FIELDS (2013). His new book, LANDFILL, will be published by Little Toller Books in early 2017. The Guardian said about FOUR FIELDS: "An enthralling and unexpected book – or four short books – about what we have made of the natural world. The language itself is rich and loamy. There is evidence of much thought here, as well as a naturalist's profound observation. It is proof that really, there is no such thing as 'nature writing' – Dee gives us the wide world and everything in it, including ourselves and all our works."

Sara Wheeler is a British travel author and biographer, noted for her accounts of polar regions. Her writing includes the acclaimed ‘Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica’ and ‘The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic’.

Richard Horton is Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet. He qualified in physiology and medicine with honours from the University of Birmingham. Richard was the first President of the World Association of Medical Editors and he is a Past-President of the US Council of Science Editors. He is an honorary professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University College London, and the University of Oslo.

Kate Clanchy is the author of two prize-winning collections of poetry, 'Slattern' which won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) and a Somerset Maugham Award, and 'Samarkand', which was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Her poetry has been broadcast by BBC Radio and published in The Scotsman, the New Statesman and Poetry Review. She writes for radio and broadcasts on the World Service and BBC Radio 3 and 4. Her poetry collection 'Newborn' covers pregnancy, birth and caring for a new baby, and she wrote a poetic picture book for children, 'Our Cat Henry Comes to the Swings'. 'What Is She Doing Here?: A Refugee's Story' (2008) won the 2008 Writers' Guild Award (Best Book) and in 2013 her first novel 'Meeting the English' was published.

David Mitchell is the author of 'The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet', 'Black Swan Green', 'Cloud Atlas', 'Number9Dream', 'Ghostwritten', 'The Bone Clocks', 'Slade House' and the translation 'The Reason I Jump'. He was twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME magazine in 2007.

David Nott OBE FRCS has been a Consultant Surgeon at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for 23 years where he specialises in general surgery. David also performs vascular and trauma surgery at St Mary’s Hospital and cancer surgery at the Royal Marsden Hospital. David is an authority in laparoscopic surgery and was the first surgeon to combine laparoscopic and vascular surgery. For the past twenty three years David has taken unpaid leave each year to work for the aid agencies Médecins Sans Frontières, the International Committee of the Red Cross and Syria Relief. He has provided surgical treatment to the victims of conflict and catastrophe in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Chad, Darfur, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Central African Republic, Gaza and Nepal. In 2015 David established the David Nott Foundation with his wife Elly. The Foundation will support surgeons to develop their operating skills for warzones and austere environments.