Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
I was once responsible for Family Doctor Publications, which were a series of booklets owned by the BMA, had titles like You and Your Bowels, and sold in huge numbers in the 1950s because they were almost the only information on health available to the public. I was much amused that in the 50s the […]
My mother is a wonderful woman but has no short term memory and drinks too much alcohol. When she’s sober her language is complex and her sense of humour magnificent. “What a terrible world,” she says, watching the television news, “I’m glad I’m not in it.” In a way, she isn’t. She’s mildly disinhibited even […]
Everybody knows that men think about sex every seven seconds. What people haven’t perhaps considered is that means more than 8000 times a day or 56 000 times a week. Despite the joke that if men only think about sex every seven seconds what on earth do they think about the rest of the time, […]
“Longevity is one of the greatest curses introduced by the scientists,” wrote Evelyn Waugh in a letter to Harold Action in 1961, a few days after his 58th birthday. I read this a few days after I had given a talk on the pandemic of NCD (non-communicable disease) where I emphasised that the pandemic was […]
Last week the World Health Assembly adopted some tough targets for NCD, including reducing deaths among those under 70 by 25% by 2025. The rhetoric is that a “whole of government, whole of society” approach will be needed, but in fact the agenda is dominated by health bodies. The Young Professionals Chronic Disease Network is […]
Recently in preparing a talk I was giving in Bologna I found a copy of a talk I’d given to WONCA, the world meeting of general practitioners, back in the era before Powerpoint existed, and it contained information on a study that has stuck in my head for 20 years, but which I couldn’t find. […]
We all know about obesity. We can see fatness. Obesity belongs to all of us, and it’s a global problem. Politicians care about obesity. But who cares about blood pressure? Raised blood pressure may be a bigger risk factor for premature death and suffering than obesity, but people don’t see it. Blood pressure belongs to […]
The Saturday before last I was rung up by a fellow of the Royal Society who was having trouble with the New England Journal of Medicine, and our conversation soon moved to the irrationality of “the REF” [research excellence framework]. We made the move because I asked why the results of a major trial undertaken […]
Last week for the first time I examined a PhD, and one of my co-examiners, a moral philosopher, told us of “Hume’s guillotine” and taught us a lesson that all doctors should know. The defence of the PhD was in Copenhagen and in public, as is the custom in Denmark. Around 80 people were there, […]
Émilie du Châtelet, the French aristocrat, philosopher, lover of Voltaire, and interpreter of Newton, had highly original (and possibly even correct) ideas on the route to happiness. Those who are tired of the drab and soulless maxims of today’s self-help guides might like to try her more exciting advice. Something that conflicts immediately with today’s […]