Druin Burch is a consultant physician, a former junior doctor, and the author of books on history and medicine.
Junior doctors are set to strike this week, despite winning little public sympathy with their demand for a 29 per cent pay rise. Doctors in their self-righteous mode – as many recently have been over this row – are insufferable. I sympathise with their situation, but they should do themselves a favour – and get
Keir Starmer’s decision to lower the voting age to 16 is widely seen as a cynical attempt to secure votes, but the truth is more frightening. Politicians pursuing self-interest are merely cynical; the real menace comes from those committed to utopia, as some Labour types appear to be in their drive to make democracy ‘better’
Homer is much praised, but I find him unreliable. The Mediterranean cove in which we were swimming, for example, was not in the least wine-dark. We were turning around and swimming back, the sights on display at the nudist end of the beach having startled the spluttering elegance of my head-above-water breast-stroke. ‘I wouldn’t mind
We Jews make up 0.2 per cent of the world’s population but have won 22 per cent of all the Nobel prizes ever awarded. And we have not done this with a tailwind. Mark Twain thought the reason Jews tended to do so well in business was above-average honesty. Jewish success has been so extravagantly
Yesterday, Wes Streeting and Keir Starmer announced a ten-year plan to save the NHS. ‘There are moments in our national story when our choices define who are,’ Streeting explained. ‘Unless the NHS changes, the argument that it is unsustainable will grow more compelling. It really is change or bust. We choose change.’ One wonders whether
We are told being non-judgemental is a virtue, that discrimination is a vice, and that the avoidance of prejudice is not merely possible but laudable. Perhaps the quickest way to give the lie to these statements is to reveal to you that I am a 53-year-old man who regularly goes to the gym. What are
Speaking at Blackpool Football Club earlier this week, Wes Streeting announced his latest bid to modernise the NHS: bold new additions to the NHS app. Artificial intelligence would be used to empower people, turning them into experts on their own conditions, while another feature would ‘show patients everything from their nearest pharmacy to the best
Before the arrival of strawberries, and not long after the coming of the swifts, the elder salutes the coming of summer after its own fashion: emerging from roadsides and hedgerows, gardens and wasteland, and scenting them with its blooms. Almost a century ago, Maud Grieve, in her 1931 Modern Herbal, said ‘that our English summer
NHS England, ostensibly wishing to respond to the challenge of childhood obesity, announced yesterday the introduction of ‘spy scales’ to monitor children’s weight remotely. These devices, which conceal the user’s weight, transmit data to an app that praises kids when they lose weight and offers guidance when they don’t. But NHS England is missing the
This week, Wes Streeting – defending Labour’s rise in National Insurance contributions and seeking to fend off the surging Reform party – announced an extra £102 million to improve primary care. The money, the Health Secretary explained, would be given to a thousand surgeries that were prevented from taking on new patients by not having
Saying that national generalisations have fallen out of fashion is an understatement. Stereotypes have become less common and less tolerated. But not all is unblemished improvement, and something of value has been lost. National generalisations – often misnamed racial – now veer close to thought crimes. A pity – national generalisations are a basic tool
Having long been a man whose spirits wilted if meat was not the centre of his meal, I have become almost vegetarian. It’s routinely predictable for age to lead us astray from our youthful socialism, but I find my dietary change more difficult to explain. My younger self would view my politics with horror and
The Queen’s College, Oxford, has put in a planning application to add the names of five alumni who died fighting for the Germans to its first world war memorial. Richard Tice, deputy leader of Reform, expressed his outrage at the plan earlier this week. ‘Where will this wokery end?’ he told the Telegraph. ‘War memorials
We British are not famed for culinary daring. An adventurous meal has traditionally been one that lacks potatoes. Nose-to-tail eating is mostly anathema to a nation that prefers the blandest part of the chicken because it’s the easiest to cut up. Poverty and shortage were not enough to spur our creativity during postwar rationing. The
It looks set to be a happy April for MPs who are in line for a 2.8 per cent pay rise, lifting their salaries to £93,904. Your reaction to that figure likely depends on how much you earn. So does mine – and since I’m about to argue that MPs are underpaid, it’s only fair I
On Monday, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic, told the entertaining story of being added, alongside Pete Hegseth and J. D. Vance, to America’s group-chat plans to bomb Yemen. Not the most obvious stuff of comedy, perhaps. Yet the affairs of men turn farcical precisely when they’re trying to be most serious. The cast here
One in seven British adults – almost nine million people – now take antidepressants. Yet a study attached to the University of California San Francisco suggests we don’t actually know if they should. The paper from the US, led by William Ward and published last month, exposes a glaring flaw: American trials test these drugs
Experts warn that doctors like me risk a condition known as ‘compassion fatigue’ – an emotional numbness that comes from too much caring for too long. But aren’t we all on the edge? Distant hardships are now visible as they happen, and the sense that victims are everywhere becomes vividly real. Newsreaders, documentary makers, editorialists,
Why should anyone care about Sydney Smith, who died on this day in 1845? 180 years have diminished the stature of his worldly achievements. He was an Anglican cleric who campaigned for an end to slavery, against the oppression of Catholics, for moral reform in the church and democratic reform in parliament. His political arguments
The NHS is swallowing more money than ever, yet delivering worse results. Now its failings are not only hurting patients, but also weighing down the economy. Employment in healthcare, said the Bank of England in last week’s Monetary Policy Report, has surged since 2019, while productivity has dropped. The Bank downgraded its 2025 growth forecast
