Podcast 2
Part of Artstation’s National Heritage Lottery Fund: interpretation of Flat Holm
Read by Glenn Davidson
On 21st April 2022, artist Glenn Davidson took Andrew Freedman, an expert in infectious diseases and Mark Taubert, Clinical Director of Palliative Medicine at Velindre Hospital, to Flat Holm. Mark’s children, Anwen (9) and Idris (4) accompanied to see and discuss the old cholera hospital. As it happened, the team was stranded on the island until late in the evening. This provided more of an immersion than was planned.
The dereliction of the cholera hospital on Flat Holm makes it hard for a visitor to imagine the terrifying history it once occupied. A ghostly memory of those suffering souls from the crematorium next door.
Last year for student training, we recorded Mark’s daily ward round. The binaural recording places a listener back into the clinical setting with the hospital sounds all around them in 3D. One patient, Vicky, subsequently died and her family chose to memorialise her life and her love of the arts, by granting us permission to use her recording as part of this interpretation work. It may be used in a planned filming soundtrack.
What parallels are there between life in a late 19th to early 20th century isolation cholera hospital, and our contemporary fight against COVID – something we all have intimate experience of? Can this experience help us to further understand the historic threat of cholera and function of the hospital?
Mark has delivered care through throughout COVID, wearing face masks and protective gear to isolate himself from contagion and transmission. Here are Mark and Andrew standing in front of the cholera hospital on Flat Holm. The children’s thoughts follow.
