Dr Gachet has the world weary look of a country GP. His portrait, which hangs in the Musée d’Orsay, always spoke to me louder than Van Gogh’s sunflowers or other celebrated paintings with their vibrant colours and, almost childlike, optimism. It has a depth of feeling, concern yet distance, and an overwhelming sadness. Unlike other […]
Liz Wager: Something of rascality
At COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics) we regularly receive cases of duplicate publication and undisclosed conflicts of interest. I was therefore intrigued to come across an accusation of publication misconduct in Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’ relating to the year 1769, which suggests such crimes have a long history. […]
David Payne on Sarah Silverman and other TEDettes
US comedian Sarah Silverman courts controversy. She’s outspoken and provocative. After performing at the technology, entertainment, and design (TED) conference I attended in California last week, she deservedly received rapturous applause from a liberal audience that days earlier had shown near-unanimous support for gay marriage. Silverman described how she wanted to adopt a terminally ill […]
Julian Sheather: Selling sickness to the worried well
I have an old friend with a long and complicated relationship with food. Several years ago she answered an ad in a woman’s magazine. She filled out a questionnaire, sent off a sizeable chunk of cash, and received back, on the basis of no discernible evidence whatsoever, a list of her likely food intolerances. Overnight […]
Vidhya Alakeson on the snowstorm hitting US health reform
Last weekend a huge snow storm brought Washington D.C. to a standstill. The federal government is closed, supermarket shelves stand empty waiting for new deliveries and most people are stuck inside, some without electricity. Suddenly the city and its politics seem to be equally frozen. Since the election of the Republican candidate Scott Brown […]
What we’re reading 12 February 2010
In the BMJ editorial office, we often come across interesting articles, blogs, and web pages. We thought we would share these with you. Some are medical, some techie, and some just general. […]
Richard Smith: Why is the health service so hopeless with domestic violence?
I’ve always thought that death, although universal, was the great taboo for health services, but now I’ve discovered something that seems to cause even greater difficulty for clinicians – domestic violence. […]
David Payne: What the world needs now
The woman who warned me I wouldn’t sleep was right. Even after just one day of talks about technology, entertainment and design (TED) at the Caflifornian conference of that name (What the world needs now, is this year’s theme) my head feels as it’s about to explode. […]
Martin McShane: Tick
In 2008 the National Patient Safety Agency set a deadline for acute trusts to implement the safer surgery checklist. By? Well, now actually. If you don’t know what the checklist is about it then read Atul Gawande’s latest book or a review of it. It would appear from a survey done by the Patient Safety […]
David Payne on ideas worth spreading in 2010
I just shared a sofa with a 25-year-old Canadian inventor, a Texan neuroscientist turned fiction writer who authored a recent BMJ editorial on synaesthesia, a former lawyer and journalist who now runs a global technology company, and a social entrepreneur whose mother took her out of school each summer to see the world. Some of […]