One of the great challenges of hospital medicine is retaining a sense of the marvel of ageing after a busy night on general take. The sheer complexity of the frail, multimorbid, and delirious nonagenarian can easily rattle junior trainees. Seeing beyond the losses to the accumulated richness of life experiences demands insight, but can be […]
Category: Desmond O’Neill
Desmond O’Neill: Ageing, astronauts, and organists in Rotterdam
“Le frime” is an almost untranslatable French word for doing something that seems superfluous for the fun of it. It is as good a term as any for the opening ceremonies of our European Union Geriatric Medicine Society conferences. These reflect how individual nations put their best foot forward for guests. While the content may at […]
Desmond O’Neill: Stethophones and barriers to effective care of older people
There is a long tradition in medicine of accepting a degree of mismatch between labels and the functions that they address. A classic example is the stethoscope, through which few of us peer, but which only a terminal pedant would now agitate to be renamed a stethophone. Recent debate over the redesignation of dementia as “major […]
Desmond O’Neill: Elective Dreams
With every elective student that joins our unit, I get a vivid flashback of my own electives. No matter how much water has flowed under the bridge since then, something particularly special endures about these less structured educational episodes. Even if undertaken in a local hospital, the elements of summer holiday, change of routine, and […]
Desmond O’Neill: Blinded by science
The newest architectural gem in Trinity College Dublin is the award winning Long Room Hub, a slim and elegant presence inserted among classical, neoclassical, and modern buildings. Just as its many windows offer unexpected vistas on to this beautiful campus, the activities of the Hub have injected fresh energy into interdisciplinary research and public engagement […]
Desmond O’Neill: Some illuminations on caring for older people
Gothenburg is a handsome city with imposing stone and brick buildings, simultaneously sober and ornamented, set among green hills falling to not one but two archipelagos. It was particularly striking during the unseasonably fine weather that greeted the 22nd Nordic Gerontology Congress last week. This leading regional gerontology conference in Europe is biannual, broad in […]
Desmond O’Neill: Expanding the imaginarium of ageing
My most formative experience in gerontology was a student gap year in Marseille. A volunteer with Les Petits Frères des Pauvres, a charmingly radical organisation dedicated to improving life for older people, I was fascinated by their motto—les fleurs avant le pain. At first sight, the focus on flowers ahead of bread seemed twee. […]
Desmond O’Neill: Combatting rigidity in medicine
High quality films for children have a special place in our cultural landscape, an appeal which even embraces the medical humanities. To reach beyond children to the adults in their entourage requires a sure touch for tapping into the universal across the lifespan. In addition, many of the underlying fables are vehicles for deep and […]
Desmond O’Neill on the power of cinema in discussing medical humanities
One of the pleasures of academic medicine, and a salve for the gentle disorganisation of Irish medical schools, is the initiative, enthusiasm, and broad ranging interests of the medical students and trainees. A recent taste of this was a play on anorexia from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival hosted by medical students at Trinity College Dublin. […]
Desmond O’Neill: Transport and health
The Goldfinch, the eagerly awaited third novel of Donna Tartt, featured on many of our Christmas reading lists. As I devoured this wonderful repositioning of the Dickensian novel into the 21st century—with drug consumption taking the place of gin palaces—little did I imagine that it would also provide a fascinating prelude to my annual visit […]