Man is the only creature that can contemplate, and enjoy the contemplation of, his own extinction. One of the means by which he might disappear from the face of the earth, at least in the imagination of the writers of pulp fiction, is by the development, either by chance or design, of a fast-spreading and fatal new virus against which he has no resistance.

The emergence of bird flu fifteen years ago conjured up visions of a viral Armageddon. It was previously unknown and it was dangerous. It gave rise to the archetypal health scare, that is to say a panic about a remote possibility that was much more frightening than more real, constant but everyday dangers with which we are so familiar that we ignore them.

Bird flu was frightening because the case-fatality rate (the proportion of people who died having contracted the disease) was high and there was no treatment for it. Fortunately, though, its communicability from bird to man was low, and from person to person virtually unknown. According to a recent paper in The Lancet, 344 of 583 people known to have contracted it in the last 15 years died of it, a very tiny absolute number by comparison with the total numbers of deaths in the world during that period.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857, two years after its subject’s death, caused a controversy and produced the threat of several libel actions (there were changes to the second edition). One of the reasons for the controversy was Mrs Gaskell’s description of Miss Brontë’s death, which was thought at the time to be indecently graphic. Recently married, Charlotte Brontë was pregnant:

She was attacked by new sensations of perpetual nausea, and ever-recurring faintness . . . A wren would have starved on what she ate during those last six weeks . . . Martha [her maid] tenderly waited on her . . . and from time to time tried to cheer her with the thought of the baby that was coming.

From this it seems that she died of hyperemesis gravidarum (BMJ 2012;344:e567, doi:10.1136/bmj.e567), though her death certificate said phthisis, which is certainly what her sisters Emily and Anne died of. These two sisters had a distinctively different attitude to medical attention: Emily refused it completely; Anne accepted it. Of Emily, Charlotte wrote only eight days before her death, “her repugnance to seeing a medical man continues immutable­,—as she declares ‘no poisoning doctor’ shall come near her.”

In fact, the whole sorry story illustrates the mess we get into when two notions become culturally prominent: on the one hand of rights and on the other of consumer choice.

Whatever the law says, most people now think that abortion is a right under all circumstances and not something that is permissible if certain conditions are met, as the framers of the law surely intended. That particular slippery slope has long been slid down. And the same people now conceive of life as an existential supermarket in which they are consumers, choosing the way they live much as they choose cranberry juice or the flavour of crisps that they want. And the customer in the existential supermarket, as in Tesco, is always right.

Into this poisonous mixture we must add the notion that any form of distress, or even the slightest frustration arising no matter how self-indulgently, constitutes an impairment of mental health: for the mentally healthy person is always happy and never experiences any difficulties in life. In short, inconvenience is the greatest of all threats to our well-being, and must at all times be avoided. It is our right to avoid it.

If I had to describe our age I should call it the age of reverberating hollowness. We no longer accept the implicit – for example, the fact that John Prescott’s love for his son is evident from his conduct towards him over many years.

No, we want him to hug him and even tell him in public, in front of an audience of millions, that he loves him. If he refuses to do so, well then, he does not really love his son because we think that there is no love without public demonstration of it. The problem with this is that it makes us crude and exhibitionistic. It sets up a kind of arms race in which people have to express themselves more and more extravagantly in order to persuade other people, and perhaps even themselves, that they feel anything at all.

All flesh used to be grass, but nowadays quite a lot of it is fast food. Although the rate of obesity among American children did not increase between the years 2007-8 and 2009-10, according to a survey recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, it is still alarmingly high at one in six. American children do not any more go to school hungry: they go to school fat.

Can anything be done about it and, if so, whose responsibility is it to do it? The U.S. government believes that children do not eat enough vegetables; it might very well be right, of course, but I suspect that the founding fathers might have been surprised that it had any opinions on the subject.

In the wake of the conviction of the murderers of Stephen Lawrence, an editorial in the Guardian referred to the ‘hard lives etched on the faces’ of the accused. By hard lives, it meant not the kind of materially difficult lives that coal miners once lived, but lives lived in a brutal and fundamentally stupid culture: such faces not being biological, but biographical and cultural artefacts. You look for them in vain in pictures of even the poor at the beginning of our monarch’s reign. When you compare the faces and manner of dress in the football crowds from that era — or of footballers, for that matter — when football was a much more proletarian game than it is now, with the faces and manner of dress now, you see only human retrogression. And in no other country do you see so many horrible faces, like those of the murderers of Stephen Lawrence, as in Britain.

Are we more criminal and more violent? In some ways, yes: the murder rate is a little less than double what it was in the early 1950s. Burglary and theft have soared — although many of the things which get stolen nowadays, such as mobile phones, simply did not exist in the 1950s.

Few causes in the 19th century were more popular than that of antivaccination. When vaccination, held by many to be medically wrong, was made compulsory, it called forth widespread opposition and even civil disobedience….

Pickering takes the standard antidoctor line (soon to be adopted with greater effect by George Bernard Shaw): “To pay the physician for curing disease is, to all intents and purposes to subsidize disease. If the Physician has to live out of disease and its treatment, rest assured that the supply will be equal to the demand.”…For Pickering, the prevention and cure of smallpox, as of all other diseases, is fresh air, exercise, vegetables, and refraining from bad habits. Plus ça change . . .

…the paradox must have struck many people that Britain is a country with a high level of long-term unemployment (the majority of those in receipt of sickness benefits are in fact unemployed) which nevertheless imports large numbers of foreign immigrants to perform unskilled labor. It is one thing to import people because your economy is so flourishing that it cannot find the workers it needs, but quite another to do so while maintaining equally large numbers of people in state-subsidised idleness.

Football rots the mind and ruins the conduct. Among other harmful effects, it deforms the ambitions of young men from poor areas; it deceives them into thinking that it is the way out of their economic problems and the sovereign way to obtain diamond studs for their ears, so essential to their dignity. Their chances of success are not much higher than that of buying a winning lottery ticket and in any case it appears that such young men in England do not even have the elementary self-discipline necessary to compete with foreigners in this activity.

We are fools, we are morons, we are criminally stupid, we are murderously idiotic!

We are like children! We deserve no freedom! We must be beaten with truncheons!