No, it’s not a description of Dalrymple’s work (although it could be). It’s a new Second Opinion piece posted on the book’s blog. This is one of my favorite of all the Second Opinion essays and might just deserve to be listed on our Online Reader page (if we ever find the time to update the site).

For non-Brits like us, the folks at Monday Books have thoughtfully begun to include a “British slang converter” with each new essay. That’s good, because I wasn’t entirely certain what constituted being “on the piss”.

Read it here.

Dalrymple’s most recent British Medical Journal column (subscription required) relates his hero Dr. Johnson’s attack on vivisection:

In the essay Johnson says, “I know not, that by living dissections any
discovery has been made, by which a single malady is more easily cured.”
At the time he wrote, Johnson was surely right; the benefits of
vivisection did not accrue until at the very least a century later. This
could not be known, perhaps, at the time; there was a basic faith that
knowledge would lead in the end to practical amelioration. So it has
proved; but not being a utilitarian, Dr Johnson would not excuse the
Hunters and von Haller on those grounds. Present cruelty is for him more
real than future benefit.

In the BMJ (subscription required), Dalrymple examines a book on the death of Dylan Thomas:

Dylan Thomas (1914-53) was a perfect poète maudit. He spent much of his
short life in dark bars, inhaling smoke and imbibing beer, often at
other people’s expense. Until I read David N Thomas’s book Fatal
Neglect: Who Killed Dylan Thomas? I (like most people) had always
assumed that he had more or less drunk himself to death. But Mr Thomas’s
theory is that he died from medical incompetence, and his case is a
good one.

We are currently traveling and have thus fallen behind on posting some of Dalrymple’s recent work. We’ll be doing some catching up today, beginning with this British Medical Journal column on self-pitying French opiate addicts Jean Cocteau and Francoise Sagan, in which Dalrymple applies some of the logic of his past writings on addiction. (Subscription required.)

Two French authors of somewhat mixed reputation, Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) and Françoise Sagan (1935-2004), wrote accounts of their withdrawal from opiates undertaken in specialised clinics. By the mere fact of doing so they were investing the process with a significance well above the ordinary. No one, after all, would write a book entitled My Head Cold: The Story of a Recovery.

Perhaps because Dalrymple illustrates so much of his work with his myriad personal experiences, his shorter essays often read like blog posts, albeit the best blog posts ever written. The effect is even more pronounced now that Monday Books is posting his Second Opinion pieces on a blog dedicated to the book.

Here is the latest, in which the doctor tries looking on the bright side of his patients’ vulgarity.

What will Dalrymple make of the following quote by French philosopher Roland Barthes?

A fly bothers me, I kill it: you kill what bothers you. If I had not killed the fly, it would have been out of pure liberalism: I am liberal in order not to be a killer.

See here to find out

The New Criterion is back from their summer hiatus, and while Dalrymple does not have an extended essay in the new edition, he does have a review of the book Bad Students, Not Bad Schools by Robert Weissberg, which he partially praises and partially criticizes.

Read it here (subscription required)

Dalrymple’s new essay at The New English Review is notable for two major reasons: it is probably the most personal essay he has ever written, and it includes what might be his most sweeping summary of modern times:

Now it is my belief, in part deriving from attending to the motions of my own mind, that resentment is pre-eminently the emotion or mode of feeling and thought of our time. When the social historians of the future, if there are any, come to characterise our era they will not call it the age of the atomic bomb, or the financial derivative age, or even that of the 100 per cent mortgage, they will call it the Age of Resentment. For everyone is on the qui vive for the supposed causes of his victim status that are deep-seated, beyond not only his control but beyond repair, at least without a total revolution in human affairs.

Read the essay here

It’s not the book but an essay in The Wall Street Journal that uses a recent article in Le Monde as another example of the modern desire to avoid hard truths:

…the main reason that the author does not ask the obvious questions is that to have done so would have been to reduce the sentimental reaction that he wanted to evoke in his readers. And a little reflection shows that this reaction depended on a rather cruel premise: that if people are to any considerable extent the authors of their own misfortunes, we should exclude them from our pity. Instead, we turn them into the passive victims of circumstance, so that we can bestow our sickly pity on them.

Read it here (subscription required)