Julian Sheather is specialist adviser (ethics and human rights), policy directorate, BMA.
It is fairly widely accepted that medicine is both a science and an art, that it lays claim to a rigorous evidence-based method, while recognising the impact of irreducibly human capacities on healing, capacities like emotion and belief that do not fit easily into a world of verifiability and fact. As a science it aspires […]
Last week I was in Uganda, speaking at a conference on monitoring the right to health. During the conference I met a fourth year medical student from Zimbabwe, Norman Matara. Norman is a tall, slim, gentle, slightly stooped young man. He does not talk much, but when he does he is thoughtful and softly spoken. He […]
One evening last week I found myself alone in the restaurant of a large golfing hotel in a remote corner of Essex. Probably because it happens so infrequently, I quite like having dinner on my own, even in a large golfing hotel. It means I get to read while I eat, something I am not […]
I have recently been reading a report on ethical issues in public health from the Nuffield Foundation on Bioethics. It is a lovely document, subtle and interrogative, delightfully rich, as all good thought should be, in unanswered questions. […]
Every so often a story comes along that unexpectedly sheds light on a far more widely shared unease. Top-up payments is one of those stories. For many years we have lived, more or less happily, with a simultaneous headline commitment to an NHS that is free to all on the basis of need, an implicit […]
It is a long time since I studied art history, but if I remember rightly the invention of photography is said to have contributed to the exhaustion of the realist impulse in the visual arts. It sounds plausible: the documentary impulse, the desire faithfully to record what is actually there, which has always been close […]
It runs like an uneasy theme in the ethics of health care provision. How do we respond to the genuine health needs of individuals who do not have legal rights of residency and are unable to pay privately for their own health care? What obligations, if any, do we have to sick people who are […]
I am forty-four. Even allowing for the decade or so that modern medicine has added to our Biblical three score years and ten, I am, statistically, over half way through the journey. There are times when I feel it. Not so much physically: never having been much of an athlete the decline of my body […]
When I was a child I had three basic approaches to making a mistake. Firstly I would run away as far as possible and pretend it hadn’t happened. […]
Do art and misery share a bed? Although we might expect art to entertain and even, at a push, to improve its audience, artists themselves are surely supposed to suffer. It is part of the job spec. […]