As a Visiting Professor at the University of Cumbria, I support my colleague Dr Lisa Fenton in teaching her ground-breaking, first-in-the-field Master’s degree in Bushcraft. Lisa is a very senior survival expert and Bushcraft professional, who ran her own company for seventeen years before writing her PhD: I teach some specialist theoretical aspects of her programme and was delighted to collaborate with Lisa and our colleague Professor Heather Prince, to produce this article.

One of the Masters’ degrees we ran in my department was in Leadership in Clinical Settings, and I was frequently nettled by government’s urging the NHS to ‘toughen up’ in order ‘to survive’. Noticing how the popular genre of ‘survival television’ gave support to that demand, I try here to bring that discourse to the surface and expose its fallacy when applied to the care of vulnerable people.

The Association for Medical Humanities has always been a fertile location for discussing new ideas, and in this paper I am developing the conceptual relationship between military and commercial colonialism and the abjection of LGBTi people.

I carried out my research into what happens when Western biomedicine meets traditional indigenous medicine in Canada’s Yukon Territory, where the hospital at Whitehorse provides a model of good practice in foregrounding traditional healthcare needs for Yukon First Nations people. This paper is one of the results of the generous help given to me by my Yukon friends, both indigenous and settled.