| It is estimated that the average person in Britain will take 14,000
dosage units in his or her lifetime, excluding over-the-counter medicines,
dietary supplements and herbal remedies. This staggering figure is illustrated
by a piece of art called “Cradle to grave”, which is the
centrepiece of an exhibition entitled “Living and dying” at
the British Museum in London. Specially commissioned by the museum, the
work was created by Pharmacopoeia, a collaboration between textile artist
Susie Freeman, GP Elizabeth Lee and video artist David Critchley.
The installation contains two 13m long pieces of fabric mesh, one representing
the life of a fictional, but typical, British man and the other, the
life of a woman. Into each piece of fabric, is knitted all the prescribed
medicines this man and woman would have taken during their lives. Each
starts with a neonatal vitamin K injection, followed by childhood immunisations.
Antibiotics and analgesics appear sporadically.
The lengths of mesh are displayed in a case, surrounded by family photographs
with handwritten captions, a mammogram, an x-ray, a hearing aid and other
medically related objects. Closer examination of the knit gives a detailed
medication history for each character. Visitors can see that the woman
took an oral contraceptive in her younger years, switching from Marvelon
to Microgynon. And when she was breastfeeding, Neogest was the contraceptive
of choice. Later on, she used hormone replacement therapy. She also survived
breast cancer (taking tamoxifen), had a hip replacement and, in her later
years, developed diabetes, taking metformin and an angiotensin converting
enzyme inhibitor.
The man takes as many medicines in the last decade of his life as in
his first 50 years. He had childhood asthma and hay fever and in middle
age, suffered occasional bouts of indigestion. He was a smoker and attempted
to give up several times, documented by the presence of nicotine gum
along the length of fabric and, later, Zyban tablets. Later in life,
he develops hypertension (he takes captopril, among other drugs) and,
aged 75 years, he survives a heart attack. A year later, he dies of a
stroke and at this point the roll of fabric becomes empty.
Undoubtedly, the piece will make visitors to the gallery more aware of
the role of medicines in their lives. Ms Freeman told The Journal that
the purpose of the installation is not to shock, but she thinks that
the installation will cause people to reflect on how we treat illness
in the UK. The medicines used in “Cradle to grave” are based
on national prescribing data and each mesh contains extracts from four
different patient records to which Dr Lee had access. “We wanted
to get in as much realistic information as we could,” Ms Freeman
said.
Because the installation is semi-permanent, waste medicines could not
be used. In addition, different products had to be tested and only those
that were likely to withstand five to eight years (the expected duration
of the exhibition) of heat and light were selected. The artists also
made an effort to use drugs from different companies. The cost price
of the drugs used in both lengths of fabric was just under £10,000.
To obtain these medicines Dr Lee wrote private prescriptions, which were
dispensed by her local pharmacist.
“Living and dying” explores the meaning of well-being in
different cultures and looks at ways in which people diagnose the causes
of their
illnesses or troubles.
|
The
Pharmaceutical Journal