“This may hurt..for longer than you think” - March 26 - 6.30pm - 2022

Dr Gavin Francis considers a rediscovery of convalescence

In a day which started with the vivid exhuberation of the Harry Potter event, it was kind of nice to wind down a little with GP and travel writer Dr Gavin Francis’ sobering (but ultimately optimistic) talk on the subject of convalescence. Typically, ‘convalescence’ is a word which almost certainly evokes images among young people of elderly relatives in care homes. But convalescence is not only so much more than that, it’s also so much more about each and every one of us, whether recovering from a life-changing illness or accident or dealing with a broken limb or tapped out mind. Indeed, the word does seem rather to have gone out of fashion in recent decades, a fact Dr Francis is at pains to state. “Almost nothing is taught about recovery at medical schools,” he says. “The term ‘recovery’ is in fact absent from the index of almost all medical books. “We need safe places to recover in but unfortunately this facility has generally been eroded over the last 30 years. “We live in an age of medical triumphancy, as the press is always keen to remind us. That the next big medical breakthrough is always just ‘round the corner. But despite fancy drugs, we still a need time and place to recover”. Dr Francis says he himself became fascinated by the term when he was young. “I have very visceral memories of recovery taking a long, long time when I was ill as a boy. So I wanted to distill down everything I have learnt and put it in one place (his book incidentally is called ‘Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence’). He was also keen to point out that “each condition has a different recovery period and different people of course recover differently” but concluded “while Modern medicine IS wonderful, far more time, energy and respect needs to be allocated to convalescence.” In short (“the book is only 100 pages and takes an hour to read”) this was a fresh and fascinating insight into a subject that seems simply, at great cost, to have been overlooked..