Colin Martin

On the road with MS

“I have been fighting a horrible and brutal war over the past seven years,” shouts Johnny Hicklenton, furiously propelling his wheelchair through the doors of a lift, in the opening sequence of a new film documenting his battle with multiple sclerosis. Some patients with chronic diseases write about their experiences, but Hicklenton is a talented artist, well known for his horror comic illustrations. So he collaborated on the artwork and animation for Here’s Johnny , made by UK film production company Animal Monday. He is definitely not an avuncular Rolf Harris, wielding a paintbrush and asking “Can you see what it is yet?” The “cancer journeys” written by oncology patients often record their genteel self discoveries in the face of adversity. Here’s Johnny establishes a more radical genre, providing a cathartic, full-on road trip through the progression of the protagonist’s disease. Think Jack Kerouac with a sketch pad instead of a typewriter. For Hicklenton, his diagnosis with MS was …

Freud's Sculpture

T his year, 6 May to be precise, is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sigmund Freud. One event marking this is an exhibition of 12 small scale sculpted figures—representative of the changing group of favourites Freud kept on his desk—selected from the eclectic collection of 2000 Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Chinese, and near Eastern antiquities he amassed between 1896 and 1939. Originally displayed in his study and consulting rooms at Berggasse 19 in Vienna, Freuds collection has since 1938 been housed at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where he spent the last few months of his life after fleeing the Nazis. When he died, his youngest daughter, Anna, left his study and library untouched. It was crammed with his furniture, books, and antiquities. In 1986, four years after her death, the house and its contents became the Freud Museum. One of the most evocative houses in London, …

And the beats go on

Colin Martin describes a project that has recorded the heartbeats of thousands of exhibition goers and stores them in perpetuity on an island in the Sea of Japan

Florence and the war machine

A clever revamp of an established museum about Florence Nightingale should switch a new generation on to the nurse’s supreme contribution to modern health care, finds Colin Martin

Det Syke Barn (The Sick Child)

Det Syke Barn ( The Sick Child ) isn’t a textbook of Norwegian paediatrics; it’s a painting by Edvard Munch that was first exhibited in Oslo in 1886. It’s not the artist’s best known painting, that of a screaming figure with hands clasped to a contorted face, now debased in countless parodies and caricatures. But Munch’s image of a mortally ill girl or young woman is important because it marks a definitive transition in his painting style, from traditional realism to a more abstract and subjective expressionism. Initially exhibited with the unspecific title Study , the painting’s …

Review of the Week: Body builders

A new book fleshes out the lives of the Victorian doctors engaged in the Herculean task of producing the classic text Gray’s Anatomy. Colin Martin reviews it

Sleep is the best medicine

Colin Martin visits an exhibition that explores the biomedical and neurological processes that occur during the third of our lives when we are asleep

Reader, I didn't blush

An exhibition focusing on representations of the sex act down the ages shows that the way sex is depicted is as unchanging as sex itself, Colin Martin finds

When flesh thinks.

A rtist Susan Aldworths interest in the mystery of human consciousness, which she has explored in her work over the past five years, was triggered by a radiological investigation carried out on Christmas Day 1999, following her suspected brain haemorrhage. “You are lying on a bed looking up at your brain scan live on a bank of monitors. You are seeing the inside of your brain with your brain. You are thinking about what …

The unkindest cut: emasculated musicians

A lthough we are now circumspect about even circumcising infant boys, many thousands of prepubes-cent choristers were castrated during the 17th and 18th centuries to prevent their larynxes enlarging and preserve their soprano or contralto vocal ranges, supported by adult male lung capacities. The testes of boys as young as eight were removed by scrotal incision or resection, without antiseptic and with minimal anaesthesia provided by alcohol, opium, or carotid artery compression. It is estimated that only 1 in 200 of those who survived the operation, and endured the eight year vocal training period for …