In 1926 Dr Hurry published a study of Imhotep, the ancient Egyptian architect and doctor, who was also the chief minister of the pharaoh, Zoser. Imhotep was later deified, and in the Hellenic period his cult was amalgamated with that of Aesculapius. Dr Hurry, who knew hieroglyphics and was acquainted with the most famous British Egyptologist of his day, Sir Wallis Budge, was such an admirer of Imhotep that he dedicated his book to his memory.

From the purely medical point of view, it is not easy to see upon what Dr Hurry based his admiration for Imhotep. He was known to have been the architect of the first pyramid, and Dr Hurry writes that Imhotep was “a fine type of scholar-physician,” who “rendered service both to the bodies and spirits of the sick and afflicted to whom it was his privilege to minister.” On the other hand he admits, “Unhappily, nothing is known of his work as a physician.” I am reminded of what a Peruvian peasant said when asked why he had voted for Alberto Fujimori: “Because I know nothing about him.”

Rupert Brooke died aged 27 in 1915, and his books immediately went through many impressions: more, I suspect, than if he had survived. His most famous poems are the five sonnets he wrote in 1914 in which he seems to dwell on the noble sacrifice of youth in war: “These laid the world away; poured out the red / Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be / Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, / That men call age …”

He suggested that in dying, men were achieving the highest kind of safety: “Safe shall be my going, / Secretly armed against all death’s endeavour; / Safe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall; / And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.”

Because Brooke was a convinced atheist without any belief in an afterlife, eternal oblivion seemed to be his conception of the highest good or at least the highest security; though, in contradiction, he often extolled the beauty of existence, the sheer joy of living. We should remember that he was a poet, not a philosopher.

This revolutionary experiment provided an alternative means of imagining events and its effect: in the gap left by splitting apart the image of the maternal body from that of her child, the temporality of the objects displayed emerges as an aesthetic device, in which the process of collection and the presentation of objects plays a key part, tracing the process of change but holding time in suspense, stretching out, in its document’s materiality, into the future.

For the authors, “profundity” is by definition polysyllabic: it means something too precious to be exposed to the uninitiated by the vulgar employment of the right word in the right place. Language is, for them, the iconostasis that preserves the holiness of the sanctuary within; only the clergy may enter, the congregation remaining strictly without, uncomprehending but adoring—preferably adoring because uncomprehending.

…Only state-dominated education and funding of cultural institutions could have resulted in this prose, which, incidentally, makes that of Leonid Brezhnev seem like Mark Twain’s.

In his speech honoring Dalrymple, Bart de Wever disagreed with Dalrymple’s frequent rejection of the label of philosopher. “Although Theodore Dalrymple has always stated that he is not a philosopher but a social critic, I do believe in the profound philosophical qualities of his work,” De Wever said.

Those qualities are in evidence in his latest essay for The New English Review, in which he sorts through the philosophical questions inherent in the act of punishment. He says that the appropriateness of a certain form of punishment is determined both by relative considerations like proportionality and by absolute ones like the avoidance of brutality but that utilitarian considerations also play a part.

Read the essay here

What this man did was dangerous, at least if it is taken as model to be followed or is in any way rewarded, because it so powerfully undermines the trust that is essential to civilised (and sincere and truthful) social and professional intercourse.

….

A camera or sound recorder is a permanent witness, but not necessarily a truthful one. For it is not true that a camera and a sound recorder never lie: not only can what they record be edited, but what is ironical can easily be made to appear literal, what is humorous can be made flippant, and what is straightforwardly minatory can be made menacing or threatening.

A lot is written about the trust patients must have in their doctors, much less about the trust that doctors must have in their patients, at least if the medical enterprise is not to be merely the first act of a legal drama.

Dalrymple has a new essay for City Journal that discusses Stephen Griffiths, the violent British criminal and diagnosed psychopath who was accepted by the University of Bradford into its doctoral program in “homicide studies” (at taxpayer expense) and then became a serial killer. Dalrymple touches on the institutional and intellectual climate in which such a thing can occur, but his essay focuses more on the British media’s characterization of Griffith’s victims not as “prostitutes” (which they mostly were) but as “sex workers” who were supposedly not engaged in what everyone knows to be an inherently risky and sordid activity. In the process, Dalrymple offers one of his most concise descriptions of the modern liberal mind:

What lies behind these mental contortions? It is a form of sentimentality, a mask for a deeper indifference, according to which people who suffer or have led unhappy lives must be transformed into blameless victims so that we can pity them. It is as if, were they to have contributed in any way to their own situation, all sympathy for them would have to be withdrawn or abandoned. And since the liberal wants to be seen, particularly by his peers, as a man superior in compassion to everyone else, he uses all his powers of rationalization, generally increased by many years of education, to establish that such and such a group of people is without blame and thus suitably—indeed, necessarily—an object of his moral generosity. If, in the process, he comes to conclusions repugnant to common sense, so much the worse for common sense.

Read it here

Hat Tip:  Mary C. and Shishir Y.