A 14-year-old girl in Britain has died after receiving a vaccine against cervical cancer. While her death has not officially been linked to the vaccine, many are assuming it to be the cause. Dalrymple argues in the pages of The Times that the benefits of immunization greatly outweigh the risks and that concern over vaccination is partially attributable to its own success at eliminating diseases that threaten human life:

As common infectious diseases loosen their hold on human beings, so the harms caused by immunisation loom larger and larger in people’s minds, obliterating remembrance of conditions before immunisation. Technical improvement is taken for granted the moment it is made (how difficult it is to remember the world before the internet, although many of us have lived most of our lives without it).

Nothing is sooner forgotten than that we have much to be grateful for. Therefore a current death from immunisation counts more than a thousand lives saved by it, in part because a death is tangible but saved life abstract.

Dalrymple writes in the Telegraph on the recent proposal by Andy Burnham, the British Secretary of State for Health, to allow patients the freedom to choose their General Practitioner:

The fundamental contradiction in our Government’s policy is that it wants to introduce the flexibility of the marketplace into a system that is fundamentally Leninist, and getting more so by the day. When you go to your doctor, he is more likely to do what the Government has told him to do to – or for – you than what, as a professional, he thinks he should do.

He does this because of targets and financial incentives. The Government has, paradoxically, de-professionalised the general practitioner by paying him so much. Few GPs have been able to resist the Queen’s, or rather the Government’s, shilling; and they have been foot soldiers ever since.

If we want real choice, there is no choice: we shall have to pay for it ourselves, and not through the intermediary of the Government or even of insurance companies, for wherever there is a third party involved there is less choice. Those who do not want choice, or cannot afford it, will have to settle for what the Sun Kings of the Department of Health grant them, once the salaries of the people working for the Department of Health have been paid, which is lack of choice.

For Americans like me, confronted with the possibility of more government involvement in healthcare, the real news here is: British citizens have been unable to choose their own doctor?! Is this what I should expect?!

In a new BMJ column, Dalrymple notes the decline in the quality of tombstone inscriptions in Britain, which he says began around 1990.

By way of comparison, I have always remembered the inscription on a tombstone I found at the Old North Cemetery in Nantucket (surely one of the most beautiful places in America):

My life in infant days was spent
While to my parents I was lent
One smiling look to them I gave
And then descended to my grave

Bezaleel Shaw
6 weeks old
Died 10/8/1770

The first essay in Theodore Dalrymple’s new book Not With a Bang But a Whimper is available online here for free. The essay holds up the career of BBC personality Jonathan Ross, and in particular his obscene interview of Conservative Party leader David Cameron and his offensive behavior toward 78-year-old actor Andrew Sachs, as an emblem of the vulgarity and coarseness into which British society has fallen:

It is difficult to conclude anything other than that Jonathan Ross is paid a fortune specifically because of his vulgarity and abusiveness, both fearless and determined.

More important, significant and revealing than the episodes themselves were the responses, public and official, to them.

Protests about the questioning of Mr Cameron were relatively few and muted. Some of the responses were beside the point. Mr Howarth, a Conservative Member of Parliament, said that ‘to refer to the most distinguished Prime Minister since Winston Churchill in this way is beneath contempt’. It was not Mrs Thatcher’s distinction, however, that made the question objectionable; it would have been no better had it been asked, say, of Mrs Castle, the Labour Minister, or Mrs Williams, the Social Democrat, or indeed of anyone else. It was wrong in itself, pointless in its vulgarity; indeed, its vulgarity was its point, and its whole point. It was vulgarity triumphant, crowing its victory over restraint and refinement.

You can buy the book  here.

From Dalrymple’s weekly BMJ column on medicine and literature:

The ambition to understand the workings of the brain, the better to control thoughts and emotions, is an old one—as is the claim that such understanding is just around the corner. In 1880 the American socialist Edward Bellamy (1850-98), best known for his utopian novel Looking Backward, implied this claim in his novel Dr Heidenhoff’s Process…

Read the essay (purchase required)