Physician, Poet, philosopher and Playwright
If there were a statue of the Unknown Polymath it should look like Raymond Tallis: rangy, bearded, wide-eyed with disciplined wonder. For 30 years he has been rising at five in the morning to write for two hours before going off to work as a doctor. He has been a GP, a research scientist, and a professor of gerontology, one of Britain's leading experts, who has published more than 70 scientific papers and co-edited a 1,500-page standard textbook of gerontological medicine. But in the solitary hours of the early morning he has also been a distinguished literary critic, poet and philosopher who has written a radio play about the death of Wittgenstein.
The contrast between the social and biological aspects of medicine is very important to him. It goes to the heart of his complaints about modern consciousness theory. Medicine, he is sure, has made all its progress by treating human beings as complex machinery, or at most as animals to be analysed like any other part of biology. That is how we gain knowledge. But the purpose of this knowledge is to treat people, who cannot be reduced to biology: "The science, the art, the humanity of medicine is a supreme expression of the distance of humans from their biology." Medicine may progress by analysing the brain, but - he insists - what philosophers need to explain is the mind, which is a different thing altogether, however much it depends on a properly functioning brain.
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