Medicine

Thursday

Peter Jones

Hippocrates’ prescription

Doctors are being urged not to tell patients what is best for them but to lay out the options and tell them to get on with it. Hippocrates (5th century BC) would have had his doubts. A key duty of the ancient doctor was, he said, ‘to help, or at least not to harm’. In this it was standard practice to involve the co-operation of the patient. As Hippocrates said, there were three components to the medical art: ‘the disease, the patient and the doctor. The doctor’s job is to serve the technical side; the patient’s is to co-operate with the doctor in combating the disease.’ Trust between doctor and patient

Thursday

Sebastian Faulks

A rose between two thorns

Emma Rauschenbach was the daughter of rich Swiss industrialists — a plump, good-natured girl, nicknamed ‘Sunny’, who married young without knowing what she was letting herself in for. Her husband, Carl Gustav Jung, was revered after his death as a guru as much as a doctor — as the mystic and visionary that Freud might have become had he not been so fixated on the role of the libido. As a husband, a father and a younger man, however, Jung appears to have been close to intolerable. He was physically large, selfish, bullying and loud of voice; he cheated at games, had a vile temper and appalling table manners; he

Thursday

Maggie Fergusson

Doctor who?

On 25 July 1865, during a heatwave, Dr James Barry died of dysentery in his London lodgings. A charwoman came in to ‘lay out’ the body. She had known the deceased gentleman: a strange-looking fellow, about five feet tall, slight and stooped and with a large nose and dyed red hair. But nothing had prepared her for what she found when she folded back the bedclothes. Barry’s whole body — ‘the genitals, the deflated breast and the hairless face’ — was unmistakably female. And as if that wasn’t shock enough, the charwoman’s eye was drawn to pronounced striations in the skin of the belly. As a mother of nine, she

Thursday

Kate Womersley

Stiffen the sinews

It’s not unreasonable to expect that the anatomy syllabus for a medical degree should include breasts. Last year I performed full-body dissection as part of my training to become a doctor. After timid first incisions to the arm, we students were entrusted with opening the chest cavity. Two obstacles blocked the way. I looked in the course manual for directions about how to cut — through? around? underneath? But there was no mention of these pleasure-giving, milk-yielding, cancer-visited organs. One justification for the vast expense of cadaveric dissection is to develop a clinical understanding of the body in its supposed entirety. Omitting the breasts reflects a way of thinking —

Thursday

William Cook

Of microbes and men

Which disease are you most scared of catching: Ebola or influenza? Before I read this medical memoir, I would have said Ebola. Now, I’d say flu. As Dr Ali S. Khan points out, Ebola is fairly hard to catch; flu is fairly easy. And unlike wimpy man flu, proper flu can be a killer. You’ve heard of the Spanish flu, which killed 675,000 Americans a century ago. But did you know that influenza still kills up to 50,000 Americans every year? Most pandemics are more like flu than Ebola: they don’t sound that spooky until they get out of hand. Yet instead, we worry about killer bugs which we stand

Thursday

Philip Hensher

Wise women in wikuoms

In spurts and bursts and flashes, a sublime novelist at work reveals herself. In Annie Proulx’s new novel, there are breath-taking pages and set pieces of extraordinary power. A man on board a ship, as the temperature plummets, sees all those around him embedded in ice before the catastrophe falls on him; a logging run down a river blocks, builds and explodes with the force of missiles; a wall of fire sweeps across a forested wildness. There are individual chapters of great dramatic force, as Proulx’s people confront the possibilities before them and produce their own solutions. But are those flashes enough? Barkskins in the end seems to me a

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

How your brain buys a sofa

Almost every popular commercial product owes its success to two different qualities. First, it does the job it is ostensibly designed to do pretty well. Secondly, it has some quality that you might call ‘limbic appeal’. It delights or soothes our unconscious mind in ways which defy objective measurement. Much as it delusionally believes that it runs the show, the power granted to conscious reasoning within the brain is that given to a slightly colour-blind, utilitarian man when he buys a sofa with his wife. The man may have his own preferences, but he has a minimal role in the selection, involving as it does many complex factors that defy

Thursday

Kate Womersley

From surgeon’s scrubs to patient’s gown

Who would you trust to take a blade to your brain? Medical schools and hospitals, arbiters of this outrageous intimacy, select the steadiest hands and the steadiest temperaments. Neurosurgery has an almost religious aura, an intellectual status approaching quantum physics and a work ethic of unforgiving precision. Most elusive of all, this elite should be able to express the pleasures and pains of being human. Ian McEwan’s fictional neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne, is suspicious in his indifference to literature, whereas Henry Marsh, neurosurgical consultant and author of Do No Harm, has earned respect through his elegant prose. To take care with words is invaluable in the heroic efforts of preserving personhood.

Thursday

Max Pemberton

The wrong cuts

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremyhunt-scatastrophicmistake/media.mp3″ title=”Dr Clare Gerada and Fraser Nelson discuss the row over junior doctors” startat=34] Listen [/audioplayer]It has long been rumoured that when Jeremy Hunt took over as Health Secretary, Cameron told him to do one thing with the NHS: keep it out of the headlines. Given that the NHS is an enormous institution, the public take an avid interest in it and it is frequently rocked by scandals and financial difficulties, this was no easy task. Until a few weeks ago, Hunt had managed it with aplomb. And then the junior doctor fiasco happened. It has been cataclysmic, one of the worst public relations disasters to rock a government

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Why can’t we get our minds around ME?

Do you ever wake up worried that you have tiny fibres growing beneath your skin, all along your spinal column? Possibly wriggling little fibres, placed there by the government or by aliens? By aliens I don’t mean asylum seekers but proper aliens, quite probably creatures with bifurcated tongues and scaly lips from the Planet Zog. If so, you may well consider yourself to be suffering from ‘Morgellons’. This unfortunate condition had its heyday at the turn of the century, with hundreds of thousands of people reporting to their GPs and clinics in the USA and here, pleading to have these little fibres sorted out somehow. Millions and millions of dollars

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 29 October 2015

Killer facts The World Health Organisation added processed meats to its list of ‘known’ carcinogens. A few of the other things which have been claimed to be linked to cancer in the past fortnight: — Make-up in Halloween outfits (blamed by a laser surgery centre in New York) — Chocolate (blamed by a colorectal surgeon at St George’s Hospital, Tooting) — Deodorants (tabloid article — no source given) — Hormone-replacement therapy (tabloid article — no source given) — ‘Roundup’ herbicide (named in US lawsuit) — Sand used in fracking, which is to say, sand (Friends of the Earth) — Nail polish (tabloid article — no source given) — Shampoo (US

Thursday

Polly Morgan

Women are still scared to talk about IVF. Let’s change that

As a result of a ruptured appendix, I am infertile. The appendicitis was followed by gangrene and peritonitis, which permanently blocked my fallopian tubes and left me having to do IVF for a chance to have my own child. I have never felt shame about my situation but I have felt isolation and grief, both of which would be very much more bear-able if people were prepared to talk openly about in-vitro fertilisation — to dispel the taboo that still surrounds it. IVF in its various forms is incredibly common these days. More than 2.5 million babies born in the past seven years began their life in a Petri dish.

Thursday

Molly Ceglowski

Baby steps

When I was pregnant, nearly everyone who’d had children asked me and my husband whether we’d booked our antenatal course with the National Childbirth Trust. Men tended to ask with a gleam of sadistic glee in their eye, and the question was almost always followed by a hurried disclaimer: ‘Ignore most of what they say, but it’s worth it for the friends.’ It seemed like an expensive and boring way to make friends: the courses are usually 17 hours long and they cost several hundred pounds. The NCT offers heavily discounted rates to people who can’t afford it, but for most of its pupils, the full fee is an accepted

Thursday

Simon Baron-Cohen

Hero or collaborator?

Steve Silberman’s stunning new book looks across history, back to Henry Cavendish, the 18th-century natural scientist who discovered hydrogen, Hugo Gernsbach, the early-20th-century inventor and pioneer of amateur ‘wireless’ radio, and countless other technically brilliant but socially awkward, eccentric non-conformists, members of the ‘neurotribe’ we now call the autism spectrum. He argues passionately for the ‘neurodiversity’ model rather than the medical disease model, for society to stop trying to ‘cure’ or ‘normalise’ those with autism, but to recognise them as neurologically differently wired, to accept difference, and support their disabilities when these surface in certain environments. His book could serve as a manifesto about extending dignity and human rights for

Friday

Meagan Campbell

Ignorance is bliss. But when it comes to your health, is it also a right?

Tell kids the Tooth Fairy is fake, and their lips are sure to tremble. Reveal the list of their birthday gifts the day before the party, and they may well despair. Those who don’t want to hear such things can try covering their ears with a ‘la-la-la-not-listening,’ but the blabbers, in most cases, aren’t violating anyone’s rights. But what about a nurse who blurts the gender of a baby to parents who didn’t want to know? Or adoptive parents who tell kids their birth origins even though it may mess the kids up? And how about terminally ill patients who would feel hopeless if they knew they were dying? Ethicists

Thursday

Simon Barnes

Pink horns and poison

The idea of dyeing a rhino’s horn pink is not absurd. It’s everything else about the 21st-century rhino-human interface that’s ridiculous. The pink-horn notion is a serious proposal and it’s as sane as the whole thing gets. There are plenty of other wacky notions out there. One is to drill a hole in a rhino’s horn and fill it with poison; the idea of the dye is to mark the horn as a poisoned one. Cutting the damn things off has also been tried. There are experiments that involve a horn-cam placed on a living rhino. If you’re involved with rhino conservation, you’re waist-deep in brochures for drones. That’s the

Thursday

James Walton

Sick and tired

When the link between tobacco and lung cancer was first established in the early 1950s, one obvious question arose: should doctors tell people not to smoke? These days, of course, the answer seems equally obvious — but at the time, medical opinion was divided. According to the highly distinguished Dr Erich Geiringer in a letter to the Lancet, ‘the best advice a doctor can give …to many non-smokers’ was that ‘they should get a pipe and dissolve their …body-destroying frustrations into blue smoke’. Less radically, Sidney Russ, a London University professor, pointed out that if doctors started nagging their patients about smoking, then logically they might as well nag them

Thursday

Matthew Adams

Curious shades of Browne

On the evening of 10 March 1804, Samuel Taylor Coleridge settled at a desk in an effort to articulate what he found so appealing about the 17th-century English polymath Sir Thomas Browne, the man he numbered among his ‘first favourites’ of English prose. He mentions Browne’s formal qualities, of course: he is ‘great and magnificent in his style and diction’; his Urne-Buriall ‘redolent of graves and sepulchres’ in every line. Yet most of his praise is reserved for Browne’s sensibility, for a man who is ‘fond of the curious, and a hunter of oddities and strangeness’; who ‘loved to contemplate and discuss his own thoughts and feelings, because he found

Monday

Daniel Jackson

New gene therapy for heart disease and diabetes: how will hypochondriacs react?

The drugs giant AstraZeneca (AZ) has signed a deal with heart researchers in Canada which pushes forward the project to prevent – and even reverse – heart disease and diabetes by identifying the genes that put people at risk. There’s been a lot of talk about ‘personalised medicine’ that offers us our own therapy tailored to our own weaknesses – specifically, the genetic time-bombs lurking our DNA. Until now, GPs have looked at our family history of heart disease, cancer, diabetes etc and (at least inwardly) shrugged. There’s only so much they can do. The AZ deal with the Montreal Heart Institute will produce one of the largest genetic screenings to date. To quote

Thursday

David Colquhoun

Prince Charles’s letters reveal the extent of his lobbying for dangerous ‘alternative medicine’

The age of enlightenment was a beautiful thing. People cast aside dogma and authority. They started to think for themselves. Natural science flourished. Understanding of the natural world increased. The hegemony of religion slowly declined. Eventually real universities were created and real democracy developed. The modern world was born. People like Francis Bacon, Voltaire and Isaac Newton changed the world for the better. Well, that’s what most people think. But not Charles, Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall. In 2010 he said: ‘I was accused once of being the enemy of the Enlightenment,’ he told a conference at St James’s Palace. ‘I felt proud of that.’ Then he added: