According to the historian Tony Judt, the Red Army, after raping and brutalising its way across Europe in the closing stages of the Second World War, left behind, in Germany alone, somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 “Russian babies.” These figures, he writes, “make no allowance for untold numbers of abortions, as a result of which […]
I am a keen social dancer and take several ballroom and salsa dancing classes a week. I’ve often wondered whether dancing has any physical health benefits. I get the feeling that dancing is considered more of a socialising tool and a form of artistic expression, rather than a serious type of physical activity. A lot […]
I think I’ve joined a gang. I’m not sure only because it was first billed as a cabal. I’ve since looked up what cabal means and I suspect it’s too private for what this gang/cabal is wanting to do. Besides, I prefer gang, if only because it makes me think of the Red Hand Gang—inner […]
Why do good staff become bad? This seems a particularly pertinent question for those of us interested in healthcare in the aftermath of Mid Staffordshire, Winterbourne View, and the repeated and deeply depressing glugs of distasteful information coming through about our callousness towards the elderly. There is certainly no evidence that healthcare staff are more […]
I’m sitting in first class on the train to Edinburgh with two glasses of red wine inside me when I look across the water to Lindisfarne and suddenly think “Perhaps I could live forever.” This was a revelation because until now I’ve been unequivocal that immortality would be unbearable. It must have been partly the […]
The standards of both undergraduate and postgraduate medical training vary widely around the world. This partly explains why the medical profession is so fiercely regulated when a doctor wishes to practise in a country different to where they trained. Whether better training necessarily predicts more professional success and competence is a different matter. I don’t […]
Every once in a while I dust off my old road bike and head out onto the North Downs to take in a few hills. Panting up a short sharp rise is about as close to elite athleticism as I get—and it is not unusual for me to get off and push. It is from […]
English speakers have been very inventive in finding words and phrases that allow them to avoid the words death and dying, and so we have discovered are people who speak other languages. This seems to be a global phenomenon. We are the kind of people who when we hear somebody say “X has passed away” […]
The study of centenarians is one of the fastest evolving fields of gerontology. In a seemingly paradoxical counterpoint to their almost inevitable tally of frailties, this group is simultaneously endowed with a remarkable psychological and physical toughness: the meek and the weak have died at earlier ages, rather like the first waves of Mosquitos succumbing […]
Things that are natural must be safe—this fallacy is deeply ingrained in our minds; it almost seems that, as human beings, we are hard-wired to believe this myth. An entire industry has developed around this claim: from toothpaste to wine, from dog-food to hand-cream, products are deemed to be better if they carry the label […]