The unique power that stem cells have to heal existing damage in the body means that researchers have long recognised their potential to promote the repair of diseased or defective organs. Haematopoietic stem cells have been used to treat conditions such as leukaemia and lymphoma, in a process that involves severely weakening the patient’s immune and blood system through radiation or chemotherapy, and then transplanting stem cells derived from either the patient themselves or a matched donor’s bone marrow or peripheral blood. This is known as haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). ed. with Seamus Perry), Tennyson Among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays (Oxford University Press, 2009)

Up until this point, he had been experiencing mobility problems to which a previous doctor had responded: “Hmm”. The creeping sense of dread leading up to the next moment is offset only by the sense that the voice speaking is in total narrative control. As a reader, and a person with several chronic illnesses, I want to follow this voice. The next stage was a scan in an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanner: a large plastic tube that looked a bit like a space-age tanning booth, in which I was instructed to remain absolutely still for half an hour while hidden machinery rhythmically banged and whirred around me, using strong magnetic fields and radio waves to produce images in the form of thin slices taken through my brain and spine. Then I did it again, this time after a contrast dye had been injected into my bloodstream to reveal any hidden areas of inflammation. It was a boring but painless hour or so, and for most of it I felt rather as I imagined a baby might in the womb, assuming its mother enjoyed listening to techno music at ear-splitting volume. An interesting experience, I reflected, but surely a waste of everybody’s time.

Cookie Control

It would have been easy for this Oxford English professor to write a simple book that explores his experience of MS. It would have done well and garnered words like “courageous” and “brave” but this approach is far more interesting. This book is about the life of an artist seeking meaning and motivation in a world that others him and oscillates between witnessing and isolating those that it doesn’t understand. Pembroke College, Cambridge: BA (1990), MA (1994), PhD (1998); Procter Visiting Fellow, Princeton University, 1991-1992; Junior Research Fellow, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, 1995-1996; Fellow and Tutor, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 1996-2002; Fellow and Tutor, Magdalen College, Oxford, 2002-present. In 2015 I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Teaching He finally left hospital at Easter 2019. What’s eerie about this in retrospect (and anyone who reads his book, the first literary account of such a procedure, is bound to feel it) is the way that his isolation – a long pause attended by many masks and gowns – prefigured the pandemic, which would arrive only months later. He nods. “Yes, I’d had many months to prepare for the pandemic – and again, this is going to sound holier than thou, but I think it gave me more empathy for people when it began. I thought: I know what this is like. I’ve rehearsed this. It turns out I’m not a soloist, after all; there’s a whole chorus of people going through the same.” With everyone in the picture, Douglas-Fairhurst proceeded to do what he has done ever since he was a child: he read furiously, hoping to make sense of the new world in which he found himself. Scanning his bookshelves, he found a volume he’d bought on the strength of its title alone. The Journal of a Disappointed Manis a memoir, first published in 1919, by the naturalist Bruce Cummings under the pseudonym WNP Barbellion. An account of its author’s experiences of what was then known as “disseminated sclerosis” – Cummings died the year it came out, aged just 30 – it had a powerful effect on Douglas-Fairhurst, one he describes compellingly in Metamorphosis. “Reading someone like him, who goes through a worse version of what I’m going through, is a form of homeopathy,” he says. “You introduce this element of trauma into your life, but at one remove, in a way you can control. It allows you a critical vantage point, enabling you to understand the illness from the inside and the outside simultaneously.” You either struggle against that, or you relax into it, and it turned out that I was one of those who could relax into it Bladder: no alarms are going off just yet, but I will need to remain in a cat-like state of readiness all day

You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. When the trapdoor opened for Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, he plummeted into a world of MRI scans, a disobedient body and the crushing unpredictability of a multiple sclerosis diagnosis. But, like Alice tumbling into Wonderland, his fall did something else. It took him deep into his own mind: his hopes, his fears, his loves and losses, and the books that would sustain, inform and nourish him as his life began to transform in ways he could never have imagined.Legs: I can feel my toes, but this early in the morning everything from the hips down is stubbornly refusing to do what I want it to; when I stumble downstairs to make a cup of tea in a few minutes, I will look like Frankenstein’s monster dressed in a bathrobe You may feel that there is already way too much politics in your life right now. But let me whisper it all the same: it seems likely that Johnson at 10: The Inside Story (Atlantic, April), Anthony Seldon’s new book, co-written with Raymond Newell, will be a gripping, if not to say utterly horrifying, read. One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry-Up by Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary (Hodder, August), may be a sight better than the average political memoir, and I’m looking forward to This Is Not America: Why We Need a Different Conversation on Race by Tomiwa Owolade (Atlantic, June). Widening the frame, A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War (Hutchinson, March) by the award-winning journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad has already been likened by William Dalrymple to Michael Herr’s classic Dispatches. My polemic of the year is the deeply researched and righteously angry Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women by Victoria Smith (Fleet, March), a book that could not be more necessary (a sword and a shield) in the current climate.

A darkly comic and moving reflection on what it means to be human in a world where nothing is certain, from the award-winning Oxford professor. MS is a fairly common illness, affecting around 100,000 people in England. But there are two kinds of the disease: relapsing remitting and primary progressive. Douglas-Fairhurst’s diagnosis was for the second kind, which is the more serious. Thanks to a faulty immune system response, the nerve cells of someone with MS are gradually stripped of their protective myelin sheaths, which means they can no longer carry instructions from the brain to the rest of the body without some of this information being lost along the way. The white lesions revealed by his MRI scan suggested it was likely his central nervous system had already suffered permanent damage. As he puts it in his book: “My body was dying like a coral reef.” There were moments when he could not think, as if his brain ‘had been replaced with a lump of warm paste’ So ended my embarrassing introduction to what doctors refer to as ‘bladder urgency’, a problem that affects up to 80 per cent of MS patients, as control over the tiny muscles that surround the bladder is gradually weakened, and an overwhelming urge to pee can suddenly arise whether or not the bladder is actually full. Having to stand in my front garden self-watering the plants didn’t feel like ‘urgency’. It felt like the start of an emergency. Most of my teaching is in the period 1700-present; this means that I teach Victorian and Modern Literature in the first year of the undergraduate course (together with literary theory and practical criticism), Romantic period literature in the second year, and a number of special options in the final year. Research InterestsWhen I was younger, the idea that my body wouldn’t immediately do what I wanted it to would have been simply inconceivable. Now I realise that this wasn’t just the thoughtlessness of youth. It was the thoughtlessness of health. Uh oh, I say, groping it tentatively. This is a bit #MeToo. But what’s this? There’s something… stiff beneath his jeans. “Yes, I’ve started wearing knee pads,” he says. “For when I fall over.” Has he fallen over a lot lately? “No, but it means that when I do, there’s less chance I’ll end up in A&E.” This sounds so worrying and grave – and yet, he is smiling. His MS has, you see, changed his relationship with his body in ways that are – unlikely as this may sound – good as well as bad. His legs, these days, are often obdurate. But better wilful legs (and knee pads) than some other things: “The less the body works, the more you appreciate any bit that still does. My eyes, for instance, have settled down in the last couple of years, which for me is hugely significant. When I ended up in hospital with eyes that weren’t focusing properly, that was very scary. I don’t want to be too Pollyanna about this, but it’s better to be grateful for what you can do than to pine for what you can’t.” I completed my BA at the University of Cambridge in 1990, before spending a year as a Procter Visiting Fellow at Princeton University. In 1992 I started a PhD at Cambridge, which I completed in 1998. I was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Fitzwilliam College in 1995, and the following year I joined Emmanuel College as a Fellow in English. I moved to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 2002 as a Fellow and Tutor and CUF Lecturer in English Language and Literature. In 2015 I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.