I don’t much care for Napoleon, but I’ve always had a sneaking sympathy for Napoleon III. His boundless ambition combined with an ultimate lack of ruthlessness, his self-importance and vanity combined with flashes of insight into his own personal insignificance, make him a far nicer man than his odious uncle. I mean no self-praise when
My copy of Schopenhauer’s essays was owned before me also by a doctor, J. Raymond Hinshaw, MD. Hinshaw, a former Rhodes Scholar, was professor of surgery at Rochester, New York, and an expert in the use of lasers in surgery upon which subject he wrote a book. He died in 1993, aged 70, and the
‘That Shakespeare,’ a German friend of mine once said to me, ‘knew a thing or two.’ ‘That Shakespeare,’ a German friend of mine once said to me, ‘knew a thing or two.’ You can say that again. Sometimes, indeed, I think he knew everything, at least everything about human nature. When a religious fanatic tells
I was about to write ‘Everyone knows the story of James Lind, the Scottish naval surgeon, who conducted the first controlled trial in the history of medicine to prove the curative value of citrus fruits in scurvy’ when I realised that it would have been a silly and, worse still, a snobbish thing to say.
The most beautiful book to come out of South Africa, at least that is known to me, is Pauline Smith’s The Little Karoo. It was published in 1925, when the racial question (as it was then called) concerned the relations of Boer to Briton. The blacks in those days were considered to have mere walk-on
Though I say it myself, who perhaps should not, doctors make very good writers. They are usually down to earth, not a quality always found among the highly educated. They are the ultimate participant-observers of life; and a little literary talent, therefore, takes them a long way, further indeed than most others. No doubt I
What a human catastrophe is the doctrine of human rights! Not only does it give officialdom an excuse to insinuate itself into the very fabric of our lives, but it has a profoundly corrupting effect upon youth, who have been indoctrinated into believing that until such rights were granted (or is it discovered?) there was
Sometimes I feel like a doctor in Chekhov: worn out, prematurely balding, old before my time and utterly superfluous. The trouble is that I’m not surrounded by Mashas, Irinas and Yelenas, but by Lees, Dwaynes and Craigs. As for birch trees, mandolins and tables set for tea, there’s not a one to be seen. On
Why do people insist on leading such terrible lives? Why do they choose misery when contentment is so easily within their grasp? Why is complete disaster so attractive, and modest success so repellent? This, surely, is the question that any unprejudiced observer of British life must ask himself. Personally, I think that soap operas have
I went to a different prison last week, in an ancient market town, to see a man about an arson. He had set fire to a house with four of his friends — or should I say former friends (his subsequent apologies not having been accepted by them) — in it. He said that he
There’s only one thing worse than slavery, of course, and that’s freedom. I don’t mean, I hasten to add, my own freedom, to which I am really rather attached; no, it is other people’s freedom, and what they choose to do with it, that appals me. They have such bad taste. The notion of self-expression
Medical students arrive for my tuition, fresh-faced and innocent, all eager for the treat. For the most part, they are still of conspicuously middle-class origin, despite the government’s desire to destroy bourgeois science and replace it with the true proletarian variety. The contact these students have had with the seamy side of life has been
Having spent so long, if not in the lower depths exactly, at least among their inhabitants, it is not surprising, perhaps, that I see the lower depths wherever I go. My experience haunts me, and I am on the lookout for them. For example, not long ago I was in a bookshop in a chic
Is there, or could there be, anything more sacred than human life? How precious is our brief flowering or interlude between two eternities of oblivion. That is why the wisdom of ages has accorded to motherhood such deep and abiding respect. Until now, that is. Last week I was examining a patient who was accused
Empathy these days is the greatest of the virtues, and he is best who empathises most. That is why pop singers and British politicians are the best people in the world: they can’t see the slightest suffering without empathising with it. Whether they behave better than anyone else is beside the point; it is what
Occasionally I walk home from the prison. Usually I take a taxi. Very rarely indeed do I drive; I don’t much care for parking within a mile radius of an establishment from which car thieves are released daily. I turned on the wireless and an unctuously sermonising Church of England voice emerged. ‘We pray for
Many of my non-medical friends complain of the pointlessness of their jobs. What they do has no meaning, they say, no intrinsic worth, apart from paying the bills. My friends feel like caged mice which run incessantly inside wheels: an expense of spirit in a waste of effort. ‘At least,’ they say, ‘your job is
What is the purpose of life? Is push-penny really as good as poetry, as Bentham contends? Surely there can have been few of us who have not sometimes wondered whether all our frantic activity — mainly getting and spending — is quite as necessary or important as we like to pretend it is. It is
From time to time, our ward looks more like a police lock-up than a haven of healing. By every bed there are two policemen preventing the escape of the patient, and usually watching television at the same time. Sometimes they and their captives chat amicably; at other times there is a sullen silence between them.
When asked to name a British prime minister other than the present one or Mrs Thatcher, my young adult patients are inclined to reply, ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t born then.’ Such an answer would not surprise Frank Furedi, the author of this attack on cultural populism; it is the natural consequence of an educational