Television: Surgery Live

“If anyone feels ill at any time, please close your eyes for a couple of minutes.” Channel 4’s series of programmes showing live surgery began with this rather ominous introduction. Most medical students’ experience is of hours of standing around operating theatres waiting for the patient to be prepared and the surgeon to arrive. Viewing the best bits of an operation in a one hour slot from a comfortable chair has rather more appeal. With a studio audience at the Wellcome Collection in London, a live relay from theatre 2 of Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, and the presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy at the helm, it was clear that this was going to be good.

This was the first of four evenings of surgery screened live from hospitals around the United Kingdom, with questions taken from an audience at the Wellcome Trust and the public, via Twitter and Facebook. We saw a