Dr Peter Fenwick is an eminent neuro-psychiatrist, academic and expert on epilepsy and disorders of the brain. To a number of his peers in the medical community, he is also a heretic: a man with outlandish ideas. In their eyes he has broken ranks; pierced a hole in the closely guarded fence that separates rigorous, logical, empirical scientists from foolish and fanciful people who believe in telepathy and ghosts and other psychic nonsense.
Only last month, Dr Fenwick found himself at the centre of a lively spat when delegates to Britain’s premier science forum objected to his views on death and the afterlife. The tall, affable 71-year-old had addressed the British Association for the Advancement of Science on the theory that human consciousness survives when the heart and brain have ceased to function. Dr Fenwick and two fellow speakers who each gave papers on telepathy and healing powers were variously called “ charlatans”, accused of “talking nonsense”, having ideas that were “beyond the pale” and a “complete waste of time” by such distinguished figures as Lord Winston, Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College, London, and Peter Atkins, Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University.
Now, back home in the relative peace of his square, comfortable house in Herne Hill in South London, he is apparently unruffled by the furore. Why were those people — his peers in the science community — so vituperative? “Fear,” he says easily. “Fear that magic will come back into science and an inability to tolerate ambiguity.” Critics object that research into deathbed phenomena is qualitative — drawn from reports of patients and their carers — rather than evidence-based, though this is not for want of trying. Fenwick has been badgering hospital ethics committees for years to let him rig up cameras and monitors around the beds of cardiac patients to observe what might happen in the few crucial minutes between arrest and resuscitation.
He was a sceptic himself once: a busy, highly respected academic and clinician, Fellow of the Institute of Psychiatry, head of the epilepsy unit at the Maudsley Hospital, treating sleep disorders and head injuries, writing papers on brain function and consciousness. Then, in 1985, a patient was referred to him following a cardiac catheter operation that had gone disastrously wrong: while surgeons battled to restart his heart, the patient found himself leaving his body and hovering over the bed watching the pandemonium going on below. Then, he told the attentive psychiatrist that he had journeyed down a long tunnel towards a bright light before being pulled back, “slammed into my body again, back with the pain”. The experience had left him in a state of acute anxiety and mental distress.
“I didn’t really believe in near-death experience,” says Fenwick. “It wasn’t yet in the medical field in this country. But after seeing this patient I thought, well, we’d better have a look.” He began collecting stories and in 1987 presented the results on a television programme. Within days he had 2,000 letters, each telling a personal story of near-death experience. Since then he has written a book, The Truth in the Light, with his wife Elizabeth, interviewed countless patients who have “come back” from death, and continued to collect reports from palliative care and hospice staff.
They tell of dying patients being greeted by dead relatives and of close family members being visited by the patient at the moment of passing — a girl reported “knowing” the moment that her brother had died in hospital on the other side of the city and of being “reassured” by him that he was all right. There were many reports of a bright light floating above dying patients, generally believed to be the soul leaving the body. Patients speak of tunnels leading towards a bright, welcoming light.
Scientists have rational explanations for these phenomena, which include hormonal and neurotransmitter changes in the body as it is closing down, a viridical perception triggered by the heart stopping and the general suggestibility of patients and relatives.
Fenwick is not unsympathetic. “The cognitive neuroscience explanation for the girl’s experience of her brother’s death is that he was expected to die, and she resolved the pain of that internally.” And he is equally in tune with the physical explanation of light phenomena. “But that doesn’t explain the fact that the light is repeatedly and consistently associated with love, peace and compassion,” he says. “It’s this lovely, ineffable quality which distinguishes it.”
I should admit at this point that I have no struggle with the idea of near-death experience; having lived in Australia I know that aboriginal people would think that something was very wrong indeed if their dying loved ones didn’t drop in to say something comforting on their way to the afterlife. But I’m not sure why we keep having to have the debate: a few people — about 10 per cent is the generally agreed figure — seem to have some sort of near-death experience involving a combination of visitation, light, tunnel and out-of-body sensation. The ingredients don’t seem to change and nor do the numbers; so why does someone of Peter Fenwick’s sizeable intellect persevere? Doesn’t he lose heart with the unproveability of it?
“No,” he smiles. “I felt that a little while ago — perhaps we know all there is to know. But not any more. If when all brain functions are down, the patient is able to receive information, then it follows that the mind can act independently of the brain. We must be able to demonstrate this objectively if we are to move forward; it’s vital for neurological science and our understanding of human consciousness.”
A grey cat appears and rubs itself against his leg. He picks her up, smoothing her fur. “She’s blind,” he says fondly. “But we think she still has a reasonable quality of life.” He is a gentle man, seemingly unruffled by the aspersions cast on his work.
Did his own colleagues shun him when he embarked on what many think of as a pretty flaky line of inquiry? He looks at me: “This isn’t a belief system of mine, you know,” he says. “I’m a scientist, totally data-driven.”
Yet later, when I ask him if he isn’t besieged at dinner parties by people wanting to tell him their deathbed stories, he says yes, but he doesn’t mind because they are fascinating and reaffirming. “They remind me I’m not mad.”
He says there is interesting work looking at what happens to relationships, sense of self and so on in people who have had a near-death experience. “People report being more spiritually aware, more concerned with family, happier.”
But wouldn’t he expect the relief of survival to have that effect anyway?
He concedes this, but says that changes were more significant in survivors who had near-death experiences than in those who had not. He says that some carers of dying patients are reluctant to discuss or even acknowledge deathbed manifestations. “We have got pain relief sorted these days, and we are very good at compassionate caring, but the area of spiritual care needs much more education. We recognise childbirth as a transcendent event — a baby becoming itself, changing the lives of those around. Death, surely, is similarly significant and yet we are reluctant to look at it. I think these experiences tell us something about how sacred death is and suggest that we could incorporate them into our culture.”
He would like to write a new version of the medieval Ars Moriendi — a manual on how to achieve a good death, for both the dying person and for those who grieve.
How does he anticipate his own death? His face lights up. “Oh, I’m enormously interested. I’d love a Victorian death with all the grandchildren — nine of them so far — gathered around the bed.”
And all the phenomena you can muster?
“Oh yes, that would be perfect.”
