Dalrymple looks at a study comparing two radical approaches to weight loss:

Gastric bypass proved to have better results all round than gastric banding, except that there were a small number of deaths immediately after surgery…The question that this study did not answer, however, was whether these improvements resulted in a reduced death rate of those who underwent surgery compared with those who did not. For it is always dangerous to suppose that the reduction in the risk factors for something (such as death from heart attacks or strokes) actually results in a reduction of that something itself. What stands to reason in medicine turns out often not to be so reasonable after all.

I happened to read this paper while I was in France. No one can possibly say that the French do not enjoy their food but it is perfectly obvious that the proportion of grossly obese people in the population of France is very much smaller than that in America or Britain. This was an aspect of the question of obesity that the paper did not mention. There is no possibility that surgery will improve the deplorable dietary choices of so many Americans and British.

At the Library of Law and Liberty Dalrymple declares his opposition to the death penalty, though as usual he goes to great lengths to understand dissenting arguments, and accepts some of them:

…I am going to write about the death penalty, a subject about which almost everyone is contradictory, including me. I am against it though I am not a complete pacifist and do not believe that it is always wrong to kill, and though I happen also to believe that it, the death penalty, works – as a deterrent….

My main objection to the death penalty is that, even in the most scrupulous of jurisdictions, mistakes are sometimes made, and for the law to put someone to death wrongly is an injustice so monstrous as to undermine trust in law itself. I once used this argument in company in which someone claimed to be able to refute me easily; for it was a fact, he said, that more people had been murdered by murderers who had not been executed than who had been wrongfully executed.

Granting for a moment his empirical premise, though I was not absolutely sure that it was factually correct, I replied that his argument was valid only if one accepted a very narrow interpretation of utilitarianism: and since I knew him to be not that kind of utilitarian, he was guilty of self-contradiction. My problem was that, on occasion and if need be, I resort to precisely the same kind of utilitarian argument myself; and therefore I was guilty myself of the very philosophical inconsistency of which I accused him. My interlocutor had the grace not to mention it.

Gavin (who runs the excellent Dalrymple forum that we all should be reading) reminded us of this wonderful, old quote from TD and asked if we remembered the source.

My proudest sporting achievement was being sent off the rugby pitch by the referee — for reading on the field.

Can’t you just picture a teenaged Dalrymple in tweed coat adjusting his glasses and trying to read his beloved La Rochefoucauld while dodging the hulking brutes out on the pitch? After much digging, we found the quote amid his “Second Opinion” column from the 6 July 1996 Spectator, which we reprint here…

AS WE all know, British doctors have many deficiencies, among them a tendency to drink too much and a complete lack of interest in their patients. Now the British Medical Journal reveals an even more serious shortcoming: they don’t know how to treat sports injuries.

This is serious because there are 19 million sports injuries a year in England and Wales alone, according to the journal, half of them among 16 to 25-year-olds, that is to say among the flower of the nation’s future (it wouldn’t be half so bad if the injuries occurred to the over-75s). Understandably in the circumstances, the British Medical Association calls upon the Government to develop a policy for the provision of services for sports injuries.

Quite right too. But prevention is better than cure, as the BMJ is always telling anyone who’ll listen. It therefore seems to me perfectly obvious what the Government’s attitude towards sport should be: it should ban it outright. After all, what other activity which produces 19 million injuries per year would the BMJ be prepared to countenance?

I hope no one will produce in reply the hoary old chestnut that sporting activity is voluntary. This completely disregards the social pressure upon young people to indulge in sport, not to mention the pressure from sadistic sports masters at school to do so: just think of all the advertisements which use celebrated sportsmen to sell their products, the newspaper coverage and television time devoted to sporting exploits, and so forth. By contrast, is any information publicly available to make youngsters aware of the dangers they run by indulging in sport? I therefore call for a total ban on pro-sporting propaganda, whether on advertising hoardings or in the media of mass communication.

But far from discouraging unhealthy and dangerous sporting activity, the British Medical Association is actually encouraging people to take up sport! Think of what this means! At the present time, only a third of the population (at most) indulges in sport: if the rest of the population were to take the BMA’s advice seriously, the number of injuries in England and Wales would rise to 57 million per year. The average waiting-time in our casualty departments would rise from five hours to at least ten.

In the very same issue of the BMI, the chairman of the BMA council, Dr Sandy Macara, was quoted as saying in a recent speech to a public health conference, ‘Every sector of human activity [should] be addressed in terms of health’, and yet he completely ignored sport as a cause of more injury even than bicycling without helmets, a feckless activity which the BMA would like to see outlawed.

Some might argue, of course, that sport — while bad for the health — is good for the character. This, I must say, has not been my impression of sportsmen: professional footballers, for example, have not on the whole been conspicuous for their moral grandeur. And my limited excursions onto the playing-fields, a long time ago now admittedly, impressed me rather with the psychopathic tendencies of those who excelled upon them. My proudest sporting achievement was being sent off the rugby pitch by the referee — for reading on the field. Little did I know then that I was not only escaping back into the warmth, but preserving my health.

Theodore Dalrymple, THE SPECTATOR, 6 July 1996

At TakiMag, Dalrymple comes out foursquare against television:

…children who grow up with TV as a large part of their mental diet have difficulty concentrating for the rest of their lives, and since the ability to concentrate is essential to finding anything interesting that is not swift-moving and sensational, and since also a large part of life is necessarily not swift-moving and sensational, those brought up on TV are destined for boredom. Degradation relieves their boredom. Better a life of sordid crises than a life like a flat-line encephalograph.

Don’t miss his description of the employees of TV broadcasters with whom he has worked.  Read it here

According to Dalrymple at the Salisbury Review, Francois Hollande lacks the appearance of an inspirational leader:

He has the air of a man who has wandered from his natural environment, say a provincial branch of a bank he is deputy manager, into the midst of a world war raging all about him. He not only lacks charisma (which is not necessarily a bad thing when one considers the damage sometimes wrought by charismatic persons), but has a kind of negative charisma. When one looks into his face, one wants to go to sleep. He manages to be both boring and wrong-headed at the same time; obstinacy is his substitute for strength.

Among the medical fictional detectives is Dr Eustace Hailey of Harley Street, specialist in nervous diseases. He was introduced to the world by his creator, Dr Robert McNair Wilson, under the pseudonym Anthony Wynne, in 1925, who subsequently wrote twenty-six novels and many short stories in which Dr Hailey solved previously insoluble crimes.

McNair Wilson (1882 – 1963) was a man of parts. Originally destined for the church, he had no vocation and studied medicine instead. Then he took to journalism, first for Lord Northcliffe and then for the Times as medical correspondent. During the First World War, he worked as a research assistant to Sir James Mackenzie, the cardiologist, studying the effect of ‘trench fever’ on the heart. He subsequently wrote two books of cardiology, The Hearts of Men and The Nervous Heart: Its Nature, Causation, Prognosis and Treatment.

After the war, he became a busy cardiologist, while remaining at the Times. He wrote extensively on economic matters, excoriating the banking system in two books and advocating a return to a type of feudalism. Two of his sons became Members of Parliament.

In a short story called The Cyprian Bees (1926), Dr Hailey solves a mysterious murder committed, as it turns out, by his old medical school friend, the eminent bacteriologist Dr Michael Cornwall. Dr Cornwall is in a financial fix; he needs to kill three people, including one very expensive paramour, a cousin and an uncle, in order to inherit the money that will set him right again.

The paramour is found dead in her car in Piccadilly, having been stung to death by a single bee sting in the forehead from a Cyprian bee. The finding of a little box nearby containing three such bees gives the game away, at least to Dr Eustace Hailey.

He surmises that the paramour has died of anaphylactic shock, having previously been sensitised to the bee sting of this particular breed. From this he concludes that the murderer must be a doctor, who has sensitised the victim under cover of immunising her.

So it turns out; and at the climax of the story, Dr Cornwall’s uncle (from whom he is second in line to inherit after his cousin, and who has also been sensitised to the bee-sting) is also stung anaphylactically to death. But the heroic Dr Hailey prevents the cousin from being similarly stung, and Dr Cornwall, the bacteriologist, knows the game is up and blows out his brains.

I read this story in a huge compilation put out by Daily Express Publications in 1934, called The World’s Greatest Detective Stories, 1024 pages long. I couldn’t help wondering, if The Cyprian Bees was one of the world’s greatest detective stories, what the worst ones were like. Oddly enough, a pedant had owned the copy of this book before me, I suspect soon after publication, and had annotated it with corrections of the authors’ grammar and exposures of their non sequiturs. I think he was probably a prickly person, for scattered through the book are comments at the end of stories such as ‘Wretchedly told – deliberately incoherent’ or ‘Unconvincing and in parts obscure.’ Against particularly egregious nonsense he writes the single testy word ‘Rot’.

He makes no such comment on The Cyprian Bees and its absurd plot. But probably he was in awe of doctors.

Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels

Dalrymple writes again (there is always a need for it) on the foolishness of inequality as a criterion. As regards health…

…those who are fixated on such equity are often at a loss to give any reason why the poor should be treated when ill other than it would be inequitable not to treat them. On their principles, indeed, it would be illogical to save the drowning child of rich parents because to do so would be to increase inequity. Equity would be increased if he drowned.

Hey, don’t give them any ideas.

Attending an art exhibition in Paris, Dalrymple is even more interested in the visitor comments book than in the art itself. One in particular catches his eye, as being…

…an implicit manifestation of the ideological temptation in art criticism. If a work of art expresses some idea or attitude to life of which we approve, or alternatively some idea or attitude to life of which our enemies disapprove, then it must be good.

Does everything have to be political?

Dalrymple has often said that satire becomes prophecy these days, and this seems to have come to pass at least once in his case…

Not long after I suggested satirically that money might be the cure for the terrible disease of burglary, experiments were performed to bribe drug addicts into remaining abstinent. I had suggested that money was a genuine pharmacological treatment of burglary because there would be a dose-response relationship (the larger the dose of money given to burglars, the greater and longer-lasting their law-abidingness) and that, as with most drugs, there would be treatment failures. Some burglars are more interested in the excitement of burglary than in its material rewards; money would have little or no effect on them.

Now, this approach has been tried on schizophrenics:

….18 of 75 patients changed their behaviour considerably as a consequence of the bribes but 57 did not. This probably means that the dose of money will have to be upped if better results are wanted. I suppose this should surprise no one. The mad are different from us, but not that different.

Someone recently said the murder of two French journalists in Mali demonstrated the need there for elections, and Dalrymple responds on his Hilarious Pessimist page at the Salisbury Review:

Have I missed something, or is it not the case that Mali has just had elections that the whole world judged free and fair? These elections followed hard upon the French military intervention to displace the Islamists in the north of the country who were threatening to overthrow the putschists who had just overthrown the president – who had been elected in free and fair elections, the only such elections until then ever held in Mali, but who unfortunately turned out to be a corrupt scoundrel – as, of course, would all his opponents have done if they had won the free and fair elections in his place.

It is also worth remarking, perhaps, that the situation in Mali deteriorated rapidly after the overthrow by France and Britain of Colonel Gaddafi in the name of – among other things – free and fair elections.