Of all the pieces Dalrymple writes, none get more comments than the medical ones. I’m sure Dalrymple would say that fact is indicative of the modern obsession with health and the drive for immortality. In his latest piece at Pajamas Media, he writes about an increasingly important medical issue:

The subject of spontaneous human combustion was of sufficient importance for Alfred Swaine Taylor to devote to it one of 12 sections in his exhaustive The Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence of 1865… “In many experiments made on different organs and on different bodies, I have not observed that different parts of the same body or the parts of different bodies have varied in their degree of combustibility.”

The imagined vision of this rather dour individual (according to all portraits of him) doggedly comparing the flammability of organs and bodies by trying to set fire to them, in order to establish his point, is one not without a certain ghoulish satisfaction.

The reason for the low turn-out during this election was that the British people can still recognise a pseudo- or para-reform when they see one. What the British people want from their criminal justice system, of which the police form a part, is safe streets and protection from crime: the one thing against which they know that the political and intellectual class has set its face. Popular indifference is caused by an awareness that our political class will move mountains to produce trifles, and produce trifles to move mountains.

I made inquiries as to find out why what had happened on Twitter had happened because it seemed to me that the events surrounding the film in terms of what happened on Twitter were an important part in understanding how this thing had achieved a scale and created a noise around potential identification that was clearly surprising.

In the middle of the last century there was a genre of books (I will not dignify it with the name of literature) with titles such as How to Live with Your Ulcer and How I Cured My Duodenal Ulcer. The lettering on the spine of the latter work, by John Parr, was in silver, except for the word “cured,” which was in diabolic red for emphasis. A cure for ulcer then was regarded as of almost supernatural occurrence.

Parr, who wrote the book in 1951, had an ulcer from 1919 until 1946, which gives him a kind of authority. We find it now as difficult to remember the miserable chronicity of peptic ulceration as to remember life before the internet. With a little effort, however, I can remember the household smell of ulceration—namely, that of boiled fish, peppermint water added to aluminium hydroxide, and various extracts of liquorice; a combination that was, aesthetically if not therapeutically, unpleasing.

Parents are inclined to believe that a child’s failure in exams condemns him or her to a life of poverty and frustration. They might console themselves with the case of Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), the great Norwegian playwright. He took the entrance exams to medical school while working as an apothecary’s apprentice—but failed them. Would we have heard of him had he passed? This is the very question that is often asked of Hitler and the Viennese art academy.

One of Ibsen’s first champions in Britain, George Bernard Shaw, who wrote the book The Quintessence of Ibsenism in 1891, took the same view of the germ theory of disease as Dr Stockmann’s father in law until his dying day, but then he was also a much lesser playwright than Ibsen.