A case study in the New England Journal of Medicine piqued Dalrymple’s interest for its use of an old Victorian medical adage:

In the end, the patient “received alemtuzumab followed by total-skin electron-beam therapy and a reduced-intensity-regimen stem-cell transplant.” The dermatologist adds that the patient “is currently doing well, 1 year after the transplantation.”

A triumph, then, you might think! But in the next paragraph the pathologist says, “Unfortunately, she died approximately 1 year later of transplant-related coronary artery disease, with the lymphoma in complete remission.”

This rather peculiar juxtaposition of the patient doing well, in the present tense, and of having died at the same time, rather casts doubt on the way in which such case histories are constructed or redacted. The patient is cured, but the patient died. However, it is by such contradictions that medicine makes its strides.

Note: Link has been fixed.

As he explains at the Hilarious Pessimist, an article in Le Figaro on Prince William’s recent CNN interview intrigued Dalrymple for reasons that may not be obvious:

What intrigued me about the article was the photograph that accompanied it. It showed Prince William sitting in the garden of Kensington Palace during the interview. He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt (the People’s Prince, then) and by the side of his chair, on the ground, was a plastic bottle of mineral water.

Presumably he had to drink the water directly from the bottle, for there was not a glass in sight, let alone a silver salver. Now it seems to me that there is no point in being a prince if one has to drink mineral water straight out of a plastic bottle like any person from, say, Leytonstone or Walthamstow; at the very least water should be served to a prince by a uniformed flunkey pouring it into a crystal glass or a silver-gilt goblet. If royal princes are going to refresh themselves in the proletarian fashion that the photograph seems to indicate, we might as well move straight to a presidential republican system.

Note: Link fixed (h/t Dave)

One aspect of Dalrymple’s thought that hasn’t been much discussed is the extent to which he is passionately “anti-war” (I put this word in quotes because supporters of military action also claim to be against war, but to consider it sometimes a necessary evil). On two occasions when discussing these issues with him, I have seen him respond with something close to indignation at the arguments in favor of military action. Now, at the Hilarious Pessimist blog, he responds to the House of Commons’s vote against attacks on the Assad regime in Syria:

For once the House of Commons has performed its function of restraining the executive branch of government. Such is the intellectual probity of our political class that if Mr Brown had been re-elected most of the Labour MPs would have voted for intervention in Syria and most of the Tories against, but we must be grateful for small mercies…

For Mr Cameron to have claimed that the vote was a triumph of democracy rather than a defeat for him was just what one might have expected from a professed admirer of Anthony ‘Bomber’ Blair. Intellectual spivvery can hardly go further; but future historians will surely find it curious that politicians who have consistently cut expenditure on the armed forces (in order to preserve their capacity to bribe civilian voters with so-called benefits) seem ever more enthusiastic about intervening militarily in distant countries without the faintest idea of what they are trying to achieve thereby, except perhaps personal aggrandizement on the world stage.

Dalrymple recently discovered the impressive history of Whitby, North Yorkshire, and details its successful painters (such as watercolorist George Weatherill, “the Turner of the North”), its photographers (Francis Meadow Sutcliffe), its explorers and sailors (Captain Cook), and its depiction in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. From the New Criterion:

There is a continuity to life in Whitby, despite all the changes in the intervening years, perhaps because it is still relatively isolated, facing the North Sea with the almost equally inhospitable North Yorkshire Moors to its rear. It is not on the way to anywhere else and the people retain a more dignified character, combined with a down-to-earth friendliness, than in most of the country. Sutcliffe complained that fate had confined him to so small a compass. But in fact it was the making of him, for he immortalized not only the town but himself (in his later years, incidentally, he was curator of the museum); and there are advantages, artistic and other, in rootedness to locality as well as disadvantages. No phrase about the human condition is shallower than that of having it all.

At the Hilarious Pessimist, Dalrymple explains why he was recently taken aback at the toys carried by some small children:

…it was the sheer vulgar hideousness of the toys, superabundant in their number and in the crudeness of their design, execution and coloration. They were all of plastic and were, of course, utterly expendable. After the children had grown out of them and into something else, in a few months at most, no one would want to keep them, either for future generations or as a memento of a happy childhood. The toys were made with the dustbin in mind from the very moment of their production.

Here was aesthetic education, or perhaps I should say training, of a kind. Would it be very surprising if these children grew up to value the meretricious and to have no powers of aesthetic discrimination at all?

We missed this article published in the Telegraph a couple of weeks ago. Dalrymple says there is little correlation between the all-too-real pain of back problems and objective medical evidence of such problems:

This, of course, makes backache the more or less perfect condition for malingerers, or those who would defraud insurance companies. This has long been recognised. When railways were still comparatively new, passengers involved in accidents or abrupt halts claimed to suffer from “railway spine”…

To this day private detectives are probably better at discerning the truth than radiographers.

Dalrymple’s second essay in this month’s New English Review relates a couple of his recent finds at second-hand bookshops, among them a bad but interesting book by an unknown author:

There is surely an instructive lesson here. Alfred Pairpoint, to judge by his book, was an average man except, perhaps, in his determination to see his words, very ordinary as they were, between covers. His thoughts and feelings and prejudices were those of an ordinary man, neither particularly clever nor particularly stupid, neither outstandingly observant or penetrating, nor outstandingly blind or lacking in penetration. In this respect, he resembles most of us: and he had absolutely no conception or inkling that the most destructive war since the Napoleonic era was about to break out. Such blindness to the future seems to be the permanent condition of Mankind: and those few who, like Sir Isaac Newton, have seen a little further than others (perhaps as much by luck as by judgment, for where millions guess the future some must be right), are rarely attended to or their correct prognostications taken as the basis of action. Our ignorance of the future is not only our permanent burden but also the glory of our lives, for it makes our engagement with the world permanently necessary. If we knew everything our lives as conscious beings would be intolerable.

In his latest essay in New English Review, Dalrymple marvels at the interest some people show in collecting and studying the most picayune items and objects, but especially animals:

Birders, at least in Britain, have a sub-culture all their own, a scale of values and a system of ethics. So important for them is seeing a new species of bird that they are quite prepared to risk their lives to do so, and the author gives several examples of birders who have lost their lives in pursuit of a sighting, including one who was mauled to death by a tiger for the sake of birds. Practically nothing, short of death, will come between a birder and the birds he wants to see, and there is one hilarious incident in the book in which young birders are driving up to Scotland in order to see a rare bird that has been reported there. They crash (and wreck) their car, and are very nearly killed, but all they can think in the hospital to which they are taken afterwards of is getting up to Scotland to see the bird. They care nothing about the car, as most young men would; neither does the pain of their injuries deter them; they care only for seeing the bird and adding it to their list of species seen. There is something magnificent in this disregard of normal everyday concerns for the sake of a non-monetary reward, and it seems that this kind of enthusiasm is by no means dead or dying; on the contrary, every generation brings forth new birders, and I find it reassuring that such eccentricity should continue in a time that I think is characterised by a horrible uniformity of taste and interest among the young. How nice it is (sometimes) to be wrong!