Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1996, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a surgeon and a painter.

Medicine and art meet in a man who's one of this country's pioneers of transplant surgery. His interest in the subject began in the 1950s

when his beliefs kept him poor, often derided, but nonetheless determined.

Forty years on he can look back on a career that's included 1500 kidney and a thousand liver

transplants.

At the same time he's drawn closer to his... kidney and a thousand liver transplants.

At the same time, he's drawn closer to his patients and his colleagues

through his love of painting.

His portraits of them have been the subject of several public exhibitions.

I've found painting to have many similar features to

surgery he says citing careful planning, intense effort and discipline as three of

the things both need to be successful. He is Sir Roy Khan.

There is, though, Sir Roy as you've pointed out, an essential difference between the two,

which is that if you don't like the painting you can throw it away.

Yes, and that's a good thing to do with a bad painting, I think.

But how much are you still moved by the loss of a patient?

I don't think that changes at all.

I think from the very beginning beginning as a medical student and throughout

one's career if a patient dies it's always a tragedy and one's always looking at

oneself for mistakes one might have made or alternative treatments that might have been better.

...