Dr Neil Morton, Reader in Paediatric Anaesthesia and Pain Management at the University of Glasgow, discusses the impact of anaesthetic agents on the developing brain, ranging from current epidemiological studies to practical advice to clinicians and families. He is the author of “Anaesthesia and the developing nervous system: advice for clinicians and families,” published in the June edition of BJA Education.
In this podcast Christopher Kuner, Editor-in-Chief of International Data Privacy Law, discusses balancing the needs of the state against the rights of the individual, and those of a smooth-running economy which depend on information flows and the claims of privacy. He also talks about the risks and benefits inherent in data flows, international differences in regulatory frameworks and current anxieties about the uses to which data may be put, including its misuses. (Further podcasts in the LawVox series are available on Soundcloud.)
With unprecedented level of access to UK immigration detention centres, Mary Bosworth has conducted hundreds of face to face interviews with detainees and staff, pursuing the question “what are these centres for?”
In the Oxford Law Vox podcast above, she outlines the number, scale, location, and growth of detention centres in the UK and discusses the political climate surrounding the recent increased use of immigration detention.
Mary Bosworth is Professor of Criminology and Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford, and concurrently, Professor of Criminology at Monash University, Australia. She is the author of Inside Immigration Detention. She works on race, gender, and citizenship in prisons and immigration detention.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography podcast: Rupert Brooke, poet, 1887-1915
“On his return to England in June 1914 Brooke’s vacillations concerning Cathleen Nesbitt were exacerbated by a developing friendship with Lady Eileen Wellesley. But the outbreak of war saved this situation and Brooke turned his romantic attention away from love towards war. He was given a commission in the Royal Naval division in September and in October was at the siege of Antwerp, but saw little action. Following this experience he wrote the five war sonnets which made him first famous, then infamous when they came to be taken as representative of the supposedly naïve patriotism of Brooke’s generation. In February 1915 the division sailed for Gallipoli, but Brooke never reached any heroic apotheosis in that ill-fated campaign: he died at sea on 23 April and was buried at Skyros the same day. He is thought to have contracted septicaemia from a mosquito bite. ‘1914 and other Poems’ was published posthumously in 1915, and his ‘Collected Poems’ in 1918.”
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography podcast: Ada Lovelace, mathematician and computer pioneer, 1815-1852
“Ada’s work was published in September 1843 in Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs (vol. 3) as ‘Sketch of the analytical engine invented by Charles Babbage esq. by L. F. Menabrea, of Turin, officier of the military engineers’. The translator and annotator is not identified on the title page, but each of her notes is individually signed AAL (Augusta Ada Lovelace). She asked penetrating questions about how the analytical engine might be applied, and hypothesized that if it could understand the relations of pitched sounds and the science of harmony ‘the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity and extent’ (Scientific Memoirs, 3, 1843, 694). She also saw the graphical potential of the analytical engine, and that by changing to a new medium, the punched card, scientific information would be seen in a new light. Thus, in a famous and influential metaphor, she wrote ‘Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves’.”
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography podcast: Audrey Hepburn, film actress (1929-1993).
“In childhood Hepburn had shown an aptitude in ballet lessons—maintained with difficulty under the occupation—which helps explain the grace of movement and natural serenity that distinguished her film stardom. Her career-in-waiting was hinted at just before mother and daughter left the Netherlands for London about 1947. Then seventeen or eighteen, she secured a role as an air stewardess in a tourist film, Dutch in Seven Lessons (1948), produced for the Dutch airline KLM. Her charming smile was the first of many on screen. In London she was accepted into the Ballet Rambert but her self-critical sense told her she lacked the precision (and possibly the physique) to succeed in that art. After trying other short-term outlets—as a fashion model, and as a travel clerk—she was hired for the chorus line of Jack Hylton’s musical High Button Shoes, gaining promotion to solo spots in intimate revue. Her radiant personality won her minor roles in several British films (including Laughter in Paradise, 1951, and The Lavender Hill Mob, 1951). Though these were somewhat decorative parts, her photographic charm earned her a three-year contract (at £12 a week) with a major studio, Associated British Picture Corporation. Ironically, she never made a film for her employers.”
Emergency airway management in trauma patients is a complex and somewhat contentious issue, with opinions varying on both the timing and delivery of interventions. London’s Air Ambulance is a service specialising in the care of the severely injured trauma patient at the scene of an accident, and has produced one of the largest data sets focusing on pre-hospital rapid sequence induction. Professor David Lockey, a consultant with London’s Air Ambulance, talks to the BJA in this podcast about LAA’s approach to advanced airway management, which patients benefit from pre-hospital anaesthesia and the evolution of RSI algorithms. Professor Lockey goes on to discuss induction agents, describes how to achieve a 100% success rate for surgical airways, and why too much choice can be a bad thing.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography podcast: Arthur Conan Doyle, writer
Conan Doyle’s fiction made astonishing progress in the early 1880s. He learned the economics of the short story from the work of Guy de Maupassant and from the Edinburgh medical journals with their logical progress from case-statement to collection of symptoms, rival diagnoses, and finally to ultimate conclusion and explanation. His first translation of these techniques into fiction ended in what is now called A Study in Scarlet. The story brought together Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson for the first time and a lifelong series was launched.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography podcast: Paul Robeson, US actor, singer, and political activist
Robeson began his acting career in 1920 and performed his first professional part in 1922 in the play Taboo. It was in 1922 a a member of the cast of this work, now renamed Voodoo, that Robeson made his debut in Britain. In later years he recalled that it was during his performances in Voodoo at the Blackpool Opera House in 1922 that he first realized he has the talent to make a career as a singer.