Each year the Reith Lectures come round as Radio 4’s annual assertion of intellectual authority, fulfilling the BBC’s original aspiration to inform and educate (although not always to also entertain). Each year, though, it’s hard not to feel a certain resistance to Lord Reith’s lofty legacy. Radio might be the perfect format for delivering a talk. Perfect for the lecturer because there is just an audience of one to focus on. Perfect for the listener because there’s nothing else to distract you. No intrusive soundscape. No other voices to confuse. But not all intellectual giants have the ability to communicate, nor an understanding of radio’s particular qualities. Sometimes the lectures sound as if they’re going to be jolly hard work, requiring the time (and energy) to listen, really listen to what’s being said about a subject that you know you should know more about but feel a bit daunted by.
This year, though, we’re being given a cracking series (produced by Jim Frank) by the American surgeon and writer Dr Atul Gawande. It’s not just that his chosen subject, The Future of Medicine, is of direct, not to say intimate, interest to everyone listening. How will we be cared for in later life by an NHS that’s already in crisis? Gawande is also a brilliant communicator. Listening to the second lecture, when he told the story of the three-year-old Austrian girl who was brought back to life after being underwater in an ice-cold pond for half an hour, you could hear the silence in the room, not a rustle of paper or a single coughing fit.
Gawande, who has written a book called The Checklist Manifesto, argues that what we face now in our health systems around the world is not a cashflow crisis, or a lack of knowledge, but a crisis of complexity.
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