In 1849 the Reverend Henry Christmas (1811-68) published a curious two volume work with the title The Cradle of the Twin Giants, Science and History, in which he traced the story of the absurd ideas or superstitions, including those in medicine, that had been believed by men of the greatest intellect. He wrote the book to correct the Whig interpretation of history: linear progress to the glorious present.
The Scots, however, feel downtrodden and resentful as only the heavily subsidized can. They also believe that the English are cheating them of oil revenues. Most North Sea oil is in Scottish waters; the Scots dream of Abu Dhabian ease and plenty, though in fact the revenues are only about $2,000 per head, and unlikely to rise much. At present these revenues go into general British coffers and are wasted by the U.K. government rather than the Scottish.The 1998 devolution of U.K. powers to a parliament in Edinburgh—one of Mr. Blair’s bright ideas—has created constitutional anomalies. It means that Scottish members of the Westminster Parliament can interfere in English but not in Scottish affairs; it is as if Delaware refused the authority of the federal government in Washington, but insisted upon its right to interfere in Texas’s business. The Scots have always felt some resentment toward the English. It was part of Blair’s political genius that he should have created English resentment toward the Scots.…The European Union would be delighted by Scottish independence, for it would represent an accretion, albeit small, of the power of Brussels vis-à-vis national governments. An independent Scotland is bound to be more Europhile (for reasons of subsidy) than the U.K.; and, for the European empire-builders, every little bit helps. Never mind that it is not an empire that they’re building, but a Yugoslavia.
The action takes place in a private clinic for “nerves” called Hopewell Towers—the tradition of giving cheery names to places for desperate cases lives on). The clinic is owned and directed by Dr Bragg, an immaculately dressed, pompous careerist. Among his staff is an ambitious and non-conformist young scientist, Dr Venner, who has been given a room to use as a laboratory that the sour matron, Fanny Leeming (who is in love with Dr Bragg, whose own wife has had an affair with Dr Venner), covets for use as a sitting room for herself. The other doctors are the avuncular Dr Drewett, over 70, a complete failure in the mode of doctors in Chekhov; Dr Thorogood, Dr Bragg’s nephew, a pretty brainless fellow; and Dr Murray, a young woman just qualified whose ambition it is to go to China as a medical missionary, and who comes to Hopewell Towers only to earn enough for her passage. But she falls in love with Dr Venner—who returns her love. To complete the complications, Dr Thorogood also falls in love with Dr Murray. The scene is set for melodrama.In his laboratory, Dr Venner singlehandedly discovers a magic bullet for schizophrenia called betrazol (surely a reference to metrazol, which was used briefly to induce convulsions in psychiatric patients). This drug regenerates the nerve cells that have supposedly died in schizophrenia. In a fury of jealousy over Dr Venner’s love for Dr Murray instead of for herself, Mrs Bragg sneaks into his laboratory to burn his research records. Dr Murray enters the laboratory to put out the fire, but a bottle of ether explodes and kills her on the spot. One begins to see what the Dictionary of National Biography means by middlebrow.
Writing at Pajamas Media, Dalrymple notes that prescriptions of opioids in the US has almost doubled in the last 18 years, and he says that opioid overdose represents a special danger for veterans. Why the increase?
Is it that doctors are ignorant of the dangers? I doubt it. Rather, they have before them patients who are suffering both physically and mentally, who say they are in pain, and for whom they, the doctors, naturally wish to do something; they have relatively little time in which to do it; and the patients communicate to them subliminally that they want strong drugs. Unwilling or unable to disoblige them, the doctors take the line of least resistance and prescribe what they think is being demanded of them.
In this recent BMJ column (subscription required), Dalrymple finds common cause with W W Jacobs (1863-1943), whose short story “A Circular Tour” illustrates a point Dalrymple has made: that the people most worried about their health are often the healthiest people. This humorous snippet from Jacobs’ story captures it quite well:
Illness? said the night watchman, slowly. Yes, sailormen get ill sometimes, but not ’aving the time for it that other people have, and there being no doctors at sea, they soon pick up agin. Ashore, if a man’s ill he goes to a horse-pittle and ’as a nice nurse to wait on ’im; at sea the mate comes down and tells ’im that there is nothing the matter with ’im, and asks ’im if he ain’t ashamed of ’imself.
…I find the argument put forward by the British Medical Association, that there is no need to change because the NHS Pension Scheme is currently “in surplus” not altogether a convincing one. It decidedly does not mean that the scheme is quietly building up its assets or investments so that they may pay dividends later to retired doctors….it is a very large pyramid scheme; and all that a surplus means is that it is currently able to meet its obligations with something to spare. Mr Madoff could have said the same for many years: that, after all, was how he made (if made is quite the word I seek) his money for many years.
I am in exactly the same position as everybody else who has a small business. I mean, I get loads of money, all from different sources, and I give it to an accountant and they manage it.
These rich bastards just don’t get it. No one should be allowed to vote in a British election, let alone sit in Parliament, unless they pay their full share of tax. Cameron’s problem is too many of his team have become super rich by exploiting every tax fiddle. Everybody should pay tax at the same rate on earnings and other earnings.
If we strip out the obvious resentment and hypocrisy of this statement, we see that Mr Livingstone is arguing for something that is well worth considering: a Reform Act in reverse, that is to say the establishment of a restricted franchise.…What is quite clear is that Mr Livingstone is arguing that at least 50 per cent of the British population should be deprived of the vote, for it is equally clear that some such percentage of it pays no tax at all, but on the contrary merely consumes it.….If you add the people in receipt of benefits to those who work in the public sector, you probably reach 50 per cent….I would suggest that workers in companies that derive more than half their turnover from public funds be excluded from the vote also. I am sure Mr Livingstone would agree.
The Spring 2012 issue of The Salisbury Review is now available, and it includes a Dalrymple piece on the need for some people to believe in the power of racism. Actually, and thankfully, history shows that racism in Britain can be overcome:
There is evidence that prejudice is not all that it is cracked up to be. Unusually, and very interestingly, the Guardian published not long ago a breakdown of household wealth, not by class or region, but by religious affiliation. Jews were the richest religious group, and were followed by – Sikhs.
This finding utterly destroys the anti-racists’ outlook, for the history of both groups is similar: on arrival they encountered considerable prejudice against them, but nevertheless flourished. The conditions that made this possible were because there was no legal impediment to their progress; the prejudice against them, while it existed, was not universal or overwhelming; and that they had the right attitudes to the family, educational and economic life. Apart from not actively standing in their way, and providing the rule of law, the state did nothing positive to help them qua communities.
You can buy and download the new issue here for a minimal fee. (Hat tip to Gavin and Andrew)
“Check out this video on YouTube.”“Hahahahahahaha, OMG!!! This is amazing!”
Furthermore, power not only corrupts but insulates from reality, both physical and moral. Bad actions come to be rationalised as necessary and then even as good.At the same time, however, an apprehension that all is not well cannot be altogether avoided, however strong the forces of self-deception. So when I read that Assad had sent his wife the lyrics of a saccharine and sentimentally self-pitying country and western song, Blake Shelton’s God Gave Me You, I was not surprised: it rang entirely true to his psychology and his situation:I’ve been a walking heartache,I’ve made a mess of me,The person that I’ve been latelyAin’t who I wanna be.Another of his favourites, apparently, is We Can’t Go Wrong by the Cover Girls, a song with the following lines:There was a time when things were better than the way they are today,But we forgot the vows we made and love got lost along the way.Psychobabble, then, meets ruthlessness. The vague and imprecise confession that things were not supposed to turn out like this is certainly not intended as a confession that they turned out like this because of anything that I did, but to exculpate me from the suspicion, including my own, of being a bad man.In other words, Bashar al-Assad reveals himself as a kind of Baathist Mr Blair, infinitely nastier because of the political traditions and situation of the country in which he finds himself. You can just hear him saying, Blairishly, “Surely you can’t think that I ordered the deaths of all those people, at least not unless I thought it was really necessary for the good of my country and the rest of humanity.”This is all very sick, but it is not the pathology of the Middle East alone. It is what happens when the contemporary psychology of the Real-Me (the notion that, no matter what I do or how I behave, my inner goodness, my original virtue, remains intact), which since the 1960s has become so profoundly Western, intersects with a vile political tradition.