Medicine as performance: what can magicians teach doctors?

they were one and the same’. So starts Howard Haggard’s little book on the rise of scientific medi-cine.1 In centuries past, a medicine man in some aboriginal tribe might have extracted an unwel-come stone or bone from a patient after showing his hands empty, much as a modern day magician would pluck a sponge ball from a child’s ear.2 Today, doctors and magicians have largely parted ways, operating in different environments and sharing only the ambition to leave the ‘client’ better off than when the two parties met. The doctor strives to improve health or prevent further deterioration, the magician to raise the spectator’s spirits or instil a pleasurable sense of wonder. In this article, I ask if contemporary magicians still