There are other ways of breaking words besides the ones we have so far dealt with: metanalysis, aphaeresis, aphesis, and apocope. Take, for example, ellipsis (Greek ἔλλειψις), which means coming short. The explanation is coming shortly. It starts with some deceptively simple geometry, originally studied by Greek mathematicians, such as Menaichmos, Euclid, and Archimedes, but really […]
Category: Columnists
Desmond O’Neill: Wheelbarrows, transport, and health
There is an old joke about a man who goes through a customs post with a wheelbarrow of sand every day. The increasingly frustrated customs officers make intensive searches of the contents, but never find any contraband. After many years, all are retired and meet by chance in a pub. When prevailed upon to reveal […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Breaking worse
There is a bewildering number of ways to break a word. In metanalysis you reinterpret the form of a word, creating a new one. An umpire, for example, was originally a noumpere, from the old French word nonper, peerless, although one batsman suggested, when I gave him out, that it was from non père, fatherless […]
William Cayley: Diagnosis—what it’s not . . .
“Phew! At least you don’t have something bad.” “I know doc, but what is it?” I’m afraid that in medicine, we too often focus on the former, and not enough on the latter. How often do we see patients admitted to hospital to “rule out” an acute coronary syndrome? How often do we do a […]
David Lock: Who has a legal duty to fund post-trial treatment?
If someone has been in a clinical trial, do they have a legal right to ongoing treatment for as long as treatment is clinically appropriate where the clinical trial was a success for that patient? I wrestled with this problem on an individual case recently where a patient got fantastic results from an expensive drug […]
Richard Smith: Do dreams have meaning? The great divide
The other night in a dream I saw my father, who died 11 years ago. He was very clear, recently shaved, with his hair combed and in full colour. He was perhaps 60, although he was 81 when he died. Smiling, he hugged the person beside me (I don’t know who that was), and then […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Breaking bad
Metanalysis is when you break a word badly. It’s defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “the reinterpretation of the form of a word, resulting in the creation of a new word; esp. the changing of the boundaries between words or morphological units.” Pea and cherry fit the first part of this definition; they were […]
William Cayley: Planning for uncertainty
Martin Marshall could not have said it better in his recent blog—the idea of the 10 minute consultation is a travesty . . . except that sometimes it is not. With the increasing demands on and increasingly complex expectations of GPs and family physicians, expecting everything to fit into a 10 minute visit is simply […]
James Raftery: Ever higher cancer drug prices—driven by US policies and genetic sequencing
The high prices charged by companies for cancer drugs has led to lots of speculation, but very little explanation. The most interesting attempt to explain these high prices has been made by a US oncologist Scott Ramsey. As the article is paywalled, I summarise it below (with thanks to the author for a copy). His […]
Julian Sheather: Forty years of the Declaration of Tokyo
Medical involvement in torture looks like a category error. Medicine has to do with the healing of bodies and minds; torture with their destruction. It is now forty years since the World Medical Association (WMA) adopted the Declaration of Tokyo on Guidelines for Physicians Concerning Torture. It was necessary then. The tragedy is how necessary […]