Exhibition: Close to the Bone - Patient Journeys Through Sarcoma

Close to the Bone: Patient Journeys Through Sarcoma 
Exhibition of photographs by Caroline Seymour
 
Hunterian Museum Gallery 
 
Thursday 15 August to Saturday 7 September  
Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10am - 5pm 

The exhibition contains graphic images of surgery 

Sarcoma is a rare and aggressive form of cancer that can arise in the bones and soft tissue. Approximately 5,300 people a year in the UK are diagnosed with it.  Close to the Bone is a series of powerful black and white photographs which document the experience of four patients (Gabor, Jessica, Vincent and Christine) with sarcoma, before, during and after surgery. 
 
A diagnosis of cancer is one of the hardest pieces of news anyone can hear. Literally life changing. It is the beginning of a long journey, for which the destination cannot be predicted. Whilst the types of treatment – chemotherapy, surgery, radiotherapy – may be similar for many patients, each person’s response, and how they are affected by each of the treatments, will be different. Cancer infiltrates not just bone and tissue, but the lives of patients and their families. 

Caroline Seymour’s photographs show rarely seen aspects of these journeys. In particular, the one part the patient can never consciously witness – the hidden world of the operating theatre, where surgical teams work with extraordinary focus, dedication and skill. 

“It is an extraordinary privilege to see the necessary and life-saving reality of surgery. To see inside a fellow patient, to revisit my own experience as a sarcoma patient. It is a never-ending daily miracle that the body can experience such trauma and still continue to function. Caroline’s photographs are like classical paintings or graphic documentary images from a war-zone. Deeply, profoundly and harrowingly moving.” Sarcoma patient 

Pairs of hands work in the sterile operative field, cutting, stitching, holding and swabbing. Tissue is dissected, bones cut out and tumours removed with clear margins. Metal replaces bone; muscles are reattached; tissue is sewn back together, and blood is recirculated. The black and white images, while they may be hard for some to look at, also convey the intensity and discipline of surgery, together with the poignancy and fragility of the experience of a patient living through sarcoma.
 
Professor Tom Cosker, consultant orthopaedic sarcoma surgeon at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre in Oxford, said: 

“This exhibition is a story from the patient’s perspective about their experience of diagnosis, treatment and follow up – the part that we, as clinicians, often do not see: the human side of the story. Caroline has brought the patients’ journeys to life in her black and white photography by capturing their thoughts, emotions, and feelings and by bringing out some of the subtleties of the complex work that we do.”