Conference Review
The 2025 Autumn meeting of the AFMS and AMFB took place between September 25th and 27th at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Manchester.
In the Thursday morning session, a thoughtful talk from Samuel Lehingue addressed the breaking of bad news; Rex Melville showed us some skin lesions arising not from an excess of sun, rather in places untouched by its rays; and Beatrice Berna talked about Frieda Kahlo and showed how her constant pain was expressed in her art. After coffee our first James Tudor invited speaker Tom Carnwath gave us the history of heroin in a wide-ranging talk which put the history of the drug and its uses and abuses in a global geopolitical context, giving fresh insights. In the afternoon we joined those who had spent the morning enjoying a Turner exhibition at the Whitworth, to explore Salford Quays and the Manchester ship canal. A pleasant boat ride in the warm afternoon sunshine was a surprise for Parisians who had left a rain-soaked capital to come to the meeting and showed us Manchester from a different perspective. A visit to the Lowry museum convinced any sceptics that the famous artist of stick-men could actually draw, and then it was time to prepare for the gala dinner. This year we were in the Midland Hotel in central Manchester, a vast wedding cake of ornate Victorian red brick, sumptuous inside and out, where we feasted and were regaled by the excellent band ‘Still Reeling’, who guided our steps through a medley of Lancashire barn dances.
On Friday we did things a bit differently from previous years. This year for the first time we offered a day rate for juniors for the Friday only and, in addition to our usual student presentations competing for the Jean-Pierre Gotlib Prize supported by the Hertford British Charitable Fund, we invited poster presentations. We were gratified to see a good field of entry for the posters of which we displayed ten, and picked one to be presented orally. It was also encouraging to see that the number of students and junior doctors attending the meeting was the highest we have achieved and that the informal feedback from this group was uniformly positive about the meeting and the society. Incidentally, formal feedback on our speakers was also sought as another first, for this year was the registration of the meeting with the Federation the Royal College of Physicians for CPD.
The morning started as always with the student presentations, a powerful field of six presentations, three British, two French and one joint. Most presenters took the plunge to speak in their non-native tongue. The winner, determined by audience scoring, was an excellent presentation from Jeremy Lelas of Bordeaux who married basic science and clinical medicine in a talk about translational research in neurophysiology and anxiety disorders.
The last presentation was a double act from a British and a French student who had met through the E-Tandem system of distance learning, which pairs English and French speaking students in a structured learning environment so they can help each other to progress. Judging by this presentation, when it works the benefits are huge. We heard more about this later in the morning from Gaelle Flower, a senior lecturer in modern Languages at Manchester University with a major responsibility for teaching French to medical students, a field in which Manchester led the country. We heard how sadly since Brexit, the university has been constrained to cut its budget for overseas placements but it was pleasing to note that around 10% of Manchester medical students are still taking the option of learning a foreign language.
Peter Hodkinson, our second James Tudor speaker, made us aware of the huge challenges involved in sending manned spacecraft into the hostile environment of space and talked about the work of the Spacesuit Physiology Laboratory to overcome some of them.
After hearing a three-person presentation of the winning poster, about the pitfalls of communication with patients in a different language, Sarra Gritti, trainee neurologist, rounded off the morning with an excellent update on the modern diagnosis of dementia.
After lunch, those who had spent the morning imbibing their learning in the august surroundings of the John Rylands library, joined us for a walking tour of Manchester with a stop at the Museum of Science and Industry before meeting up for afternoon tea, several hundred feet above street level in the Cloud 23 bar of the Deansgate IHG Hotel. After vertiginous tea and sandwiches, presentations were made to the winners and runners-up of the Hertford British Jean-Pierre Gotlib prize.
On the final morning of the meeting James McDonald stunned us with a brilliant talk on the current thinking on the aetiology of MS and outlined new research on vaccination against Epstein-Barr virus, which might provide a big step forward in the management of that distressing condition. Amel Marniche summarised current management of glioblastoma and Ashmal Qumar reminded us of how far behind our stated goals for the eradication of TB we are and gave us reasons for the shortcomings.
At the Annual General Meeting of the British Society, our outgoing president Colin Mumford who over 7 years has steered the society through the stormy waters of Brexit and COVID into calmer seas, and under whom the society has greatly flourished, handed over the reins to the president elect James McDonald. We thank the former for his service at the same time as wishing his successor every success for the years to come.
Tim Reilly
