Alderson, Priscilla; (2009) Why I wrote Children's consent to surgery. Clinical Ethics , 4 (3) pp. 159-162. 10.1258/ce.2009.00902.

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Abstract

In 1989, when I began the research for Children's Consent to Surgery, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The new Children Act for England and Wales advised attention to children's ‘wishes and feelings’. The wave of rebellion around the Soviet Union led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and although protests were suppressed in Tiananmen Square, Nelson Mandela's freedom was imminent. It was a time of cracking open old ideas and constraints to advance new approaches and freedoms. That year, I attended a lecture in Canterbury about Hieronymous Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. The lecturer puzzled inconclusively over the eggshells, glass and other fragile forms in the garden, and by chance I spoke afterwards to a woman who believed that they symbolize the necessary breaking open if new life, delight and understanding are to emerge. ‘Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding’.1 That day symbolized the year for me in many ways, not all apparent at the time, and I will review some of the ways later.

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