A US magazine once asked me to write an article about doctors who had become political leaders: presidents, prime ministers, that kind of thing. What I discovered was that doctors were better at being dictators than democrats. By “better” I mean more fitted by experience and temperament, not better morally.

Doctors have always been prepared to step outside their professional field, in a wide variety of roles—for example, that of cook. The most famous medical cook was, perhaps, William Kitchiner (1775-1827), whose book, The Cook’s Oracle: Containing Receipts for Plain Cookery on the Most Economical Plan for Private Families, Being the Result of Actual Experiments in the Kitchen of William Kitchiner MD, went through many editions, was in print for decades after his death, and had sold more than 15 000 copies by 1822. Cookery book bestsellers, it seems, are not a new phenomenon.

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Dr Kitchiner’s friend, William Jordan, wrote of his dinners that, “His medical and gastronomical practices were wonderfully combined in so much that his guests could not tell whether what was set before them was a meal or a prescription.”

Dalrymple ponders a difficult (and unlikely) question about a recent experience with a government service: What made it so good?

I very much doubt that those who worked in it were well paid: they were certainly not in it for their own financial advancement. I think there were probably two conditions: first that the work was intrinsically meaningful and interesting to those who performed it, and second that the staff had a genuine desire to serve.

If there is a single law of literary life, it is that nit pickers will have their own nits picked. My copy of Essays and Studies by W A Osborne establishes this clearly. Osborne (1873-1967) was professor of physiology at the University of Melbourne. Born of a Presbyterian clergyman in County Down, he was a rationalist with a particular dislike of Catholicism. He was an expert in nutrition, and advised Captain Scott before his ill fated Antarctic mission. Scott did not take his advice, however, with unfortunate results.

Osborne was also a literary scholar of distinction, speaking several languages fluently. He was undecided whether to take the chair of physiology or that of English, and perhaps preferred literary studies to scientific ones. He was always disappointed not to be elected to the Royal Society and that he received no decorations.

Writing at his Salisbury Review blog, Dalrymple turns to literary criticism, focusing not on writers’ logic but on their actual writing. What would you make of this opening line from a novel?

This piece at Pajamas Media looks at the pressure on doctors to overprescribe painkillers, which in turn makes drug addiction more likely. One reason pressure on doctors has increased:

Dalrymple on the Joyce Carol Oates story The Museum of Dr Moses in the British Medical Journal (subscription required):

This is not exactly a question most of us have considered, but recent epidemiological studies say we should. Dalrymple is quick to point out that, in these kinds of studies, correlation does not mean causation, but he also notes some potential problems from these parasites.

Read it here

In New English Review Dalymple reports on a poll demonstrating French preference for architectural preservation over forward-looking creativity, and identifies an ideological source for the disapproval expressed by the newspaper Le Monde:

The fact is that, after hundreds of years, the French have lost altogether the knack of building something that someone in the future might look upon with pleasure. They are not the only European nation to have done so; but their architects are definitely among the worst and most incompetent in the world.

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That modernism in France was and is more than a merely aesthetic mistake, but was and is motivated by a mean-spirited, envious, ideological levelling impulse, is something that the article in Le Monde makes clear:

The classification or labelling [of buildings to be preserved], without regard to the social class protected, could be a brake on modernity… It also limits brave new forms in architecture. It promotes the process of gentrification, chasing the least well-off classes from the city centres when real estate prices rise with the growth of tourism.

It seems to me that this amounts to something like the following: I cannot, and will never be able to, afford to live in the best part of Paris, therefore I would prefer that no one should live in the best part of Paris, at least as it currently exists; I would prefer it to be the kind of place that I could afford to live in, that is to say much uglier and less desirable. For this to happen, it must be ruined by, for example, the kind of buildings erected in la cité de l’Etoile – a single one of which, incidentally, would be more than enough to destroy the appearance of whole quarters of Paris.

…I derive a certain comfort from looking over, and being surrounded by, my laden shelves. They are my refuge from a world that I have found difficult to negotiate; if it had not been for the necessity of earning my living in a more practical way, I could easily, and perhaps happily, have turned into a complete bookworm, or one of those creatures like the silverfish and the small, fragile, scaly moths that spend their entire lives among obscure and seldom disturbed volumes. I would have not read to live, but lived to read.

The shelves are an elaborate hieroglyph of my life that only I can read, and that will be destroyed after my death. Never having been a scholar of anything in particular, my life has been a succession of obsessions; as some murderers return to their crimes and become serial killers, I am a man of serial monomanias, each lasting a few months at most, and my books reflect this. A friend of mine, looking over them, said that anyone trying to discern from my books who I was or what I did would fail; for what has the history of Haiti to do with poisoning by arsenic, or the history of thought in nineteenth-century Russia with that of premature burial, plague, cholera, and the anti-vaccination agitation? Surprising numbers of books on all these matters are to be found on my shelves; and if I needed any reassurance of my own individuality, as the increasing number of people having themselves tattooed or pierced seemingly do, these shelves would supply it.

Pop songs in a taxi provide clues to the global financial crisis. Three minutes of pure fun by TD.