Claire Turner and Jack Gann explore questions of personalised medicine, digital technologies, and prevalent health concerns in the exhibition You Choose.
What if you had a miracle cure for all your niggling aches and pains? What if we could prevent cancer in people with a genetic predisposition to the disease? And could emerging medical technologies make that possible?
These were some of the questions posed in the 2024 exhibition You Choose. By inviting visitors to participate in, and share information about, their health identities through a series of interactive questions about their medical preferences, the exhibition offered a window into contemporary public concerns around medicine, particularly those of children and young people. The responses of visitors revealed a public anxious both about the daily mundanities of routine medication and the life changing threat of serious illness.
In this post, we scrutinise the responses collected from visitors in relation to two core aspects of the exhibition: personalised pills and imagined cures. By asking visitors to make a series of choices, the exhibition revealed various overarching concerns about healthcare and medicine. These include the accessibility and desirability of medication and the prevalence of diseases such as cancer. Both these concerns are discussed in depth in this post.
The Exhibition
You Choose was a family oriented exhibition held at the Thackray Museum of Medicine in Leeds, produced in collaboration with the LivingBodiesObjects project team at the University of Leeds.
With the theme of personal choice embedded throughout, upon entering the exhibition, visitors were provided with a questionnaire, the responses to which they could choose to share with the museum or not. The choice of whether to share their answers served to reflect the notion that increasingly personalised medicine will also require people to be willing to share large amounts of personal data. Each area of the exhibition prompted visitors to make a choice about their imagined ideal treatment.
‘Like and Prescribe’
The pharmaceuticals section, entitled ‘Like and Prescribe’, focused on the concept of personalised prescriptions. The display was inspired in part by the work of FABRX, a pharmaceutical printing specialist based at University College London (UCL), who loaned the museum the M3dimaker Lux, a prototype 3D pharmaceutical printer (Xu et al., 2021). A 3D pharmaceutical printer allows printed tablets, or ‘printlets’, to be produced to custom dosages, shapes, colours, or flavours. The exhibition asked visitors, via a series of spinning boxes, to select what shapes, colours, and flavours would make a pill easier for them to take. In addition to recording their choices on the questionnaire card, visitors were also asked an open-ended question – “What would your personal pill treat?”. They were able to pick any condition, real or imaginary, that a pill could be used for.
Visitors to the exhibition picked a wide range of colours, flavours, shapes, and conditions for their imaginary pills, with pills to treat pain and mental health conditions (particularly depression and anxiety) proving the most popular. Pain removal was the highest-ranking personalised pill option.
Pain is not a specific condition but a symptom of various illnesses. Pain ranked highly because it is pervasive in so many conditions and pills to treat it are widely familiar. Many children who visited the exhibition were able to recognise a painkiller as opposed to less widely-used pills such as beta blockers. Painkillers are the most purchased over-the-counter pills, and paracetamol, aspirin, and opioids are all within the top ten most prescribed medications for NHS England (Audi et al., 2018). Given the popularity of painkillers, both as prescription and purchasable pills, people often see the word ‘pill’ and think of ‘pain’. The association between the two is obvious.
Associations between colour and mood or wellbeing are subjective and culturally modulated. Nevertheless, there is a significant body of research into associations between the popularity and effectiveness of medication and their colour, going back to the 1950s when yellow placebo pills were found to give patients more energy (Lasagna et al., 1958). Among visitors to You Choose, pink was the most popular pill colour. This is indicative the exhibition’s audience (half of all the questionnaire responses were from people under 20). While research into adult colour preference does not usually favour pink, children have been found to prefer the colour in both liquid and solid medication, a choice related to a perception that pink medicine has a sweeter taste (Alessandrini et al., 2023).
Wider research into preferred medication colour tends to emphasise the relationship between different colours and different effects. While the established wisdom that painkillers are the colour white was not supported by the exhibition’s audience, those concerned with treating mental health experiences chose sunny yellows and oranges in greater quantities than the overall average. This reflects and contradicts existing findings (Tao, 2017; Wan et al., 2015).
‘Digital You’
The wearable technology section, entitled ‘Digital You’, centred on a hybrid closed-loop automated insulin management system, popularly known as an ‘artificial pancreas’ (NHS, 2014). Here, visitors were asked: “If you could choose just one injury or disease to be treated automatically, what would it be?”. While the personal pill question prompted a diverse spread of responses, this question elicited one answer that was repeated at a far greater rate than any others: cancer.
In some instances, participants offered further explanation as to their choice of illness or injury. One participant answered, “Cancer, so nobody has to suffer as it affects 50% of people”, while another wrote “Cancer. It’s too common and too many people are impacted by it”. Responses such as these reflect the growing use of projected statistics in media campaigns on the disease, particularly on popular TV shows such as The Great British Bake Off’s ‘Stand Up to Cancer’ spin-off, where viewers are reminded that one in two of us will get cancer in our lifetime.
Participants also noted the prevalence of cancer in the lives of people they knew. Two participants explained that they chose cancer because “so many amazing people have died from it” or “my teacher died of it”. These answers were provided by younger visitors, revealing the young age at which people are exposed to the disease. In fact, the high number of respondents who chose cancer can partly be seen as reflecting the concerns of the exhibition’s young audience. Over half of visitors aged 11-20 (the largest cohort of respondents to the questionnaire) answered “cancer”, roughly twice the proportion seen in the 51-60 and 61-70 age groups. That this is directly opposite to the ages at which a new cancer diagnosis is most likely, suggests that people’s concerns were not about their own treatment so much as that of those close to them or across society as a whole (CRUK, 2022).
Cancer is a pervasive illness. It is a powerful disease that affects family members, friends, and sometimes healthcare professionals in ways that other illnesses might not. Recent research into the social implications of cancer suggests several reasons as to why the disease has such an impact beyond the patient themselves. On a familial level, cancer often results in a restructuring of relationship dynamics, with partners, children, and parents taking on informal and formal caring roles (Wraith 2005). Similarly, families might uproot their lives and move nationally and internationally to receive appropriate treatment, a process which also often involves significant financial investments (Clow 2001). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is the perception that cancer is hereditary. Families are not just emotionally connected to a cancer patient but are also connected physically, and the concept of a ‘cancer family’ can cause significant distress and anxiety (De Moulin 1983; Cantor 2007).
The majority of respondents did not specify a particular type of cancer in their response to this question. Visitors whose responses were categorised as ‘pain’ often assigned this pain to a particular part of their body, such as migraines and headaches, toothache, or period cramps. In contrast, people who wanted an automatic treatment for cancer tended simply to say “cancer”. Only two types of cancer were identified: childhood cancers in general, and leukaemia, a cancer that disproportionately affects children. This specificity reflects the intense emotional dimensions that attend childhood cancer cases. While the data in general shows children themselves as being particularly concerned about curing cancer, this interest in childhood cancers came from the young adult age group (21-30-year olds), rather than children or older adults.
Conclusion
The future of personalised medical treatment offers exciting possibilities, but asking people to consider that future also reveals their anxieties. Ideas surrounding personalised pill choices stem largely from personal experiences not only with illness itself, but with access to medical treatment and experiences of healthcare more broadly. Rising rates of cancer, especially among young people, make the desire for a ‘miracle cure’ entirely reasonable (Zhao et al., 2023). The emergence of personalised cancer mRNA vaccines based on the principle of pharmacogenomics during the development of You Choose shows that this is a need that is being answered in cutting edge personalised medicine research. But – as the vast majority of cancer research funding goes to early-stage research into treatments like these, which may not impact people for several years (if ever) – we could be asking a further question: do you want to focus on the search for a perfect personalised cure of the future, over improving primary chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments on the frontline right now? As with many of the other choices in You Choose, there is no easy or obvious answer.
About the authors
Claire Turner is a historian of medicine and the senses. She is currently a Bridging Fellow in Medical Humanities at Durham University. Claire has worked as a research fellow on two major exhibitions at Thackray Museum of Medicine, including ‘You Choose’.
Jack Gann is curator at Thackray Museum of Medicine in Leeds, where he has curated exhibitions including Blood: Ties and Tensions, POO!, and You Choose. His past research interests include Victorian studies and participatory, immersive museum spaces. He is currently working on a new exhibition on anatomical illustration.
References
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