Image by Dominic G Davis
Though health sceptics of one kind or another have been around for centuries, the pandemic has made them newly visible. Understanding these sceptics has become increasingly vital, and this is the goal of the Healthy Scepticism project. This multimedia, multidisciplinary project seeks to understand and contextualize those who have stood and continue to stand outside of modern healthcare and to use this knowledge to foment positive healthcare change.
As part of the broader Healthy Scepticism project, Helmie will develop a film to explore cancer, in many ways the emblematic disease of modern medicine. Starting with the observation that in the main cancer therapies have remained largely the same since at least the beginning of the 20th century - the ‘poisoning’ by chemotherapy, the ‘burning’ by radiation, and the excision by surgery – the film aims to ask what happens to our view of healthcare when we allow cancer therapies the space to speak.
Caitjan Gainty a Senior Lecturer in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Department of History, Faculty of Arts & Humanities. She is a historian of twentieth century health and healthcare and the principal investigator of the Wellcome-funded Healthy Scepticism project, which examines the role of medicine's critics and detractors, its dispossessed and antagonists in the constitution of its contemporary form.
Helmie Stil is an award-winning filmmaker. Her films have been shown on television and international film festivals. She won the Cadence Video Poetry 2019 award; the Reelpoetry Houston award and she was shortlisted for the prestigious OutSpoken Prize for Poetry. Helmie is the director and founder of poetrycinema – films inspired by poetry.
Blog written by the project team
July 2021
We are getting closer to the feel and characters of our Poison Burn Cut animation film.
Here are some sketches and thoughts/ideas:
The confusion patients feel and the confusion in the history of cancer progress.
The character with a hole in his body stands for Cut. The character with the head on fire stands for Burn and we are experimenting with charcoal and water so see if we can create a Poison character. We would like to create the feeling of having so many thoughts/feelings/opinions while diagnosed with cancer by using a background where the characters can go different ways upside down staircase, a maze, an Escher kind of feel of the space.
Quotes about cancer treatments, its history and numbers could be written in the animation, so the viewer gets information and can form their own ideas about cancer treatments.
A sketch on how to connect the different cancer treatments
A short animation showing Dominic Davis’ experiments with movement and characters for Poison Burn Cut