28th October 2021 – By Emily Stevens
Night falls across the creeping Thames, glass glitters under the clouded sky, a sliver of the moon breaks through, and stirring autumnal wind crosses the glimmering edifice of St Thomas’ Hospital. Approaching winter seems to hang in the air as shadows lengthen in the evening light. These shadows climb the walls of the hospital.
Some windows are lit, some are not. If ghosts walk the halls, Agnes Elizabeth Jones nods to Florence Nightingale, and William Cheselden wonders how much mercury Isaac Newton ingested.
In the Twin Research clinic, samples of all kinds have been collected. This includes around 300,000 aliquots of blood, stored as serum and plasma. From finger-prick bloods to phlebotomy blood draws, a prowling vampire would be fascinated. Blood and guts are the source from which discoveries spring.
Through corridors, through laboratories under fluorescent light, the penumbral night seeps. Every catalogue of Halloween costumes tends to include nurse’s scrubs – hospitals can be spooky, can be cinematic. So can twins—the unheimlich, or the uncanny, plays on the material of life. I’m reminded of Michael in Caryl Churchill’s play ‘A Number’ pointing out: ‘We’ve got thirty percent the same [DNA] as a lettuce. Does that cheer you up at all? What I love about the lettuce. It makes me feel I belong.’
The trees along the river quiver down below. Curtains flutter in the breeze, woodsmoke drifts from distant bonfires. Beyond the clinic windows, clouds swirl in the sky like a witch’s cauldron.
From the clinic and labs of TwinsUK: Happy Halloween!
