Switching off can be hard in medicine. No matter where one turns, the observational reflex kicks in, prompted by the goitre of the newscaster or the Bell’s palsy of the bank teller. And we can run but they won’t hide, as I found out at a late night outing to Prometheus, the latest instalment of […]
Category: Desmond O’Neill
Desmond O’Neill: Aiming to lose
Working as a doctor in Ireland has many positive aspects, particularly a warm human ambience and a remarkable love of the spoken word. On the debit side of the linguistic largesse is a leaning to the elliptical and the discursive, and a generalised tendency to soften the hard blows of life. A prime example of […]
Desmond O’Neill: The ethics of advocacy
The infant’s eyes are huge, the profile of its tiny cheek bisected by a naso-gastric tube and its ugly adhesive patch. Peering from the corner of the billboard, the image aches with vulnerability and fear, a message reinforced by the slogan—Sick Children Are Out Of Time. Arising from a recent major publicity campaign by a […]
Desmond O’Neill: Old ideas
The year has barely started, but it is a fairly safe bet that one of the stand-out albums of 2012 will be Leonard Cohen’s Old Ideas. For the many (including me!) allergic to the bedsit misery of his early work, there is reassurance about what old age can bring us in the drollery, bite, and […]
Desmond O’Neill: One hundred years of flautitude
No geriatrician could pass up on the opportunity: a performance of a flute concerto written by a living composer in his 100th year by one of the greatest orchestras in the world, the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It took place without any formal linkage to the almost 4,000 delegates attending the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) […]
Desmond O’Neill: Donizetti and the GP
It is almost certainly the most unique operatic experience in Europe. As you walk up a narrow street of terraced houses in a small coastal town in south-eastern Ireland, you enter a modest entrance and are suddenly in the middle of a sophisticated walnut-clad atrium. This in turn leads into a striking marriage of smart […]
Desmond O’Neill: Quantitative easing – the academic version
The economic downturn has given us all a crash course in the arcane language of economics. A fine example is “quantitative easing,” a sober and serious sounding euphemism for the unnerving practice of governments printing money to spend their way out of a hole. While it may make sense in the short term, it dilutes […]
Desmond O’Neill: Death and the composer: Thanatos as muse?
Even though my clinical life is enmeshed with an active arts and health programme with music in pole position –a composer in residence in the Stroke Unit and a hospital residency by a chamber orchestra – taking part in a three day musicology conference dedicated to the late music of Schubert seemed hugely daunting at […]
Desmond O’Neill: First night of the Proms
It is a sure sign of the ever diminishing pool of memorable acronyms that even the most treasured of ceremonial events can be hijacked for the basest of clinical motives. In recent years, a prominent casualty was one of the highlights of the British cultural summer, the Proms. Rather than a magnificent series of concerts […]
Desmond O’Neill: A rare scientific hiccough at the science gallery
Despite a surprisingly large scientific heritage [1] , the Republic of Ireland has no science museum. Nature abhorring a vacuum, an innovative avenue for celebrating science was created by the opening of the Science Gallery in Trinity College Dublin in 2008. This flexible if modest space has been a runaway success under its gifted director, Michael […]