Monthly Archives: April 2012

Is It Ever Right to Put a 13-Year-Old Girl on the Pill?

The Daily Express asks the question, and Dalrymple grudgingly answers yes. It is far from the best solution to the problem of teen sexual relations, he says, but it is the only realistic option for a doctor.
If a doctor is presented with a girl of 13 who tells him she is having sexual intercourse how can he not prescribe the Pill?
He has to do what he thinks is best for his patient and he cannot possibly think it best that she should become pregnant, much less have a baby.
That would certainly not be in her interest, nor in society’s (though the latter cannot be the doctor’s main consideration).
He has little option but to prescribe, though this puts him in the awkward situation of conniving at what the law says is a sexual crime.
Read the whole piece here

Erecting a Tomb to Irish Sovereignty

This story in City Journal (h/t Joel U.) demonstrates at least one thing that the euro is actually good for:
In Dublin, the artist Frank Buckley has constructed the interior walls of his flat with bricks made of shredded, de-commissioned Euro bank notes—with a face value of 1.4 billion Euros—that the Irish mint gave him for this purpose. All the furniture in the flat, including the microwave and the lavatory, is also lined with the shredded notes. He calls the lavatory “the Bertie bowl,” after Bertie Ahern, the now- discredited prime minister who presided over and benefited politically from the Irish property bubble that has indebted the country for decades to come….
Ireland having since been placed more or less under the tutelage of the European Central Bank, the European Union, and the International Monetary Fund, Buckley has erected a tomb to Irish sovereignty in one of his flat’s three rooms. Initially intended as a private home—Buckley has praised shredded Euro bank notes for their heat-insulating quality—his flat, literally made of money, soon had so many visitors that he decided to open it as a museum.

Too young to retire, too old to keep the job

Dalrymple has a new article in the Telegraph (h/t Teddy Msigwa) that points to growing conflict between older and younger workers. Because the economic crisis has reduced older workers’ savings, they are increasingly postponing retirement and working later in life. Younger citizens, who already face a tough job market, are finding it even more difficult to land a job now because of the glut of more experienced and capable workers remaining in the market. Older workers are now facing a growing chorus of social critics calling for them to step aside and let the youth take over.
I thought we would see much more of this kind of intergenerational conflict by now. Our older generations have voted themselves a flood of benefits and entitlements for decades, and they’ve stuck youngsters with the tab. And yet the youth thus far have expressed outraged at any suggestion that the benefits be scaled back, no doubt because they cling to the hope that the shell game will continue through their own retirement. Still, I think we are going to see more of this kind of conflict.

Leniency and Its Costs

Dalrymple has a short piece for City Journal on George Thompson, the man whose act of arson helped kickoff the 2011 London riots and who was just sentenced to over 11 years in prison as a result. Dalrymple notes that Thompson had already had an extensive criminal record long before the arson.

What, you might ask, was such a man doing at liberty? Well, most importantly, he was providing a living for the lawyers who defended him when he was caught: he was what one might call a criminal Keynesian. And he was providing ammunition for penological liberals who argue that prison doesn’t work. After all, he had been to prison and still he set fire to the furniture store, endangering the lives of so many people!

Aspirin: The Elixir of Life?

A medical piece at Pajamas Media:

Three recent papers in The Lancet propose the benefits of low-dose aspirin both in the prevention of certain cancers and in their spread once they have developed…

Does this mean that those of us who have reached the age of cancer — the incidence of cancer rises with age — should all be taking low-dose aspirin prophylactically? There is no indubitably correct answer to this question, and it all depends on your scale of values.

Dictators and their doctors


Dalrymple in the British Medical Journal (subscription required):



There is something fascinating about the memoirs of the servants or confidants of great dictators. They allow us to see raw power close up, and to thrill to its horror. Personally, I can never resist a book with the title I Was X’s Y, where X was a dictator and Y was his maid, secretary, or chauffeur.


Doctors have written memoirs of dictators. Among the most famous, or infamous, are those of Dr Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao. When they were published there was a controversy as to how genuine they were, with both translator and publisher accused of spicing them up to attract sales. The author himself was accused of claiming a closer relationship than he really had with the Great Helmsman, whose insatiable sexual appetite and deficient personal hygiene, an unfortunate combination, he describes in horrifying detail.


Hitler’s doctor, Theodor Morell, kept a secret diary in which he recorded his master’s manifold symptoms and his unconventional treatment of them (he was known sarcastically as the chief Reich injection officer)­­­­­—treatment which is thought by many to have hastened Hitler’s physical deterioration. Once in US captivity, Morell himself claimed to have applied such treatment precisely for that end; but then he would, wouldn’t he?


Franco’s dentist, Julio Gonzalez Iglesias, wrote a memoir called Los Dientes de Franco (Franco’s Teeth), a dental biography of the Caudillo, in which we learn the effect Franco’s continual dental problems—he suffered greatly from toothache—had upon his temper and hence upon his decisions.

The Ugly Brutishness of Modern Britain


Dalrymple had an Op-Ed in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal (h/t: Joel U.) on incivility in modern Britain and its “militant or ideological edge”:


Even middle-class people now behave in an increasingly uncouth and rough fashion in Britain because they think that by doing so they are expressing their solidarity with the lower reaches of their society. Imitation, they think, is the highest form of sympathy. This, of course, is an implicit insult to many of the poor, for poverty and unmannerliness are by no means the same thing.

Read the piece and its 183 comments (some of which are not filled with outrage) here.

Innocent tumours

Dalrymple profiles a noted physician-author in the British Medical Journal (subscription required):
Sir John Bland-Sutton (1855-1936) was a most remarkable man. The force of his personality emanates almost palpably from his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography and its accompanying photograph. He was a small man who was said to have resembled Napoleon. As a surgeon he was dextrous and decisive. He had a ferocious—but constructive—determination to succeed, and he was generous to his juniors.
….
Two things puzzled me about Bland-Sutton’s Tumours (his double-barrelled name, incidentally, was assumed by deed poll, the union of his middle name and his surname): firstly, the dramatic nature, or grossness of the pathology, of the cases illustrated; secondly, the recognisability of the people who suffered from that pathology.
As artistic artefacts, the illustrations, though of the ugliest possible phenomena, are beautiful, and of enormously skilful draughtsmanship. But do such extreme cases, does such gross pathology (for example, of chondromata), exist nowadays? If not, is it because it does not occur in the first place, because surgical alleviation always attenuates it or because we hide it away, as the Victorians were supposed to have hidden piano legs?

Arrested hydrocephalus and the Round Britain Quiz

In the British Medical Journal (subscription required) Dalrymple recounts the difficult life of the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne:
According to the pathologist William B Ober, who wrote many essays on the pathography of authors, Swinburne experienced anoxic brain damage at birth as a result of his large head (a state of arrested hydrocephalus). This anoxic damage manifested itself in Swinburne’s lifelong choreiform movements, his dysgraphia, tics, and hyperkinesis, as well as in his masochism. Portraits of Swinburne indeed show him as having a massive upper head by comparison with the rest of his body.
The lines quoted above are from “The Triumph of Time,” the long lament that he wrote after his one and only disappointment in love, after which he swore that he would never marry. And he never did. According to Harold Nicolson’s book Swinburne (1926), and other sources, the loved one was Jane Faulkner, the foster daughter of Sir John Simon—surgeon, public health pioneer, and later author of English Sanitary Institutions. Jane was fostered because her mother, Sir John’s sister, had died when she was young.
Sir John, whose sanitary reports were quoted by Karl Marx, kept a literary salon that luminaries such as John Ruskin attended, as did Swinburne. The latter addressed verses to Jane, who was scarcely more than 10 years old at the time. According to legend, he offered to marry her but she laughed at him; there was an altercation between them and he fled the house never to return. He then wrote his poem that quivers with misery: “I shall go my ways, tread out my measure, / Fill the days of my daily breath / With fugitive things not good to treasure . . .”

Bringing Nightingale down to size

In the British Medical Journal Dalrymple calls F B Smith’s Florence Nightingale: Reputation and Power “[o]ne of the great works of historical debunking”:
We all love heroes and heroines, but even more so do we enjoy the exposure of their hidden faults. I will not speculate on why this should be so: perhaps it is that, our lives being mediocre, we fear to contemplate unmitigated the heights of human accomplishment.
The greater is the reputation; the more guiltily delicious is the debunking. When I was a child, Florence Nightingale was an untouchable heroine, like Elizabeth Fry. Before her, nurses were Dickens’ Mrs Gamp; after her, they were ministering angels. Soldiers were eternally kissing her shadow as she went by.
….
Smith chronicles her manipulations, deviousness, evasions, and lies, but he admits that, overall, she did an immense amount of good. His aim is to disabuse us of the romantic idea that people who do good must themselves be good, but let us hope that his readers do not take this as a licence actually to be bad.
His explanation as to why Miss Nightingale did not destroy documentation that was unflattering to her memory is memorable:
Florence Nightingale, like Mr Richard Nixon and his tapes, was so possessed of the habit of deceit and the conviction that the full record would compel posterity to vindicate all her actions, that she could not bring herself to destroy material which had become part of her identity. Having brazened out lies in life she would brazen them out in death.