I suspect many of Dalrymple’s readers shared his horrified reaction to the recent physical attacks made on managers of Air France by an angry mob after Air France announced a round of layoffs. Besides the attacks themselves, Dalrymple was also outraged by the reaction to the news by commenters at the Guardian website.

There was an incipient bloodthirstiness about the commentary that was horrible. It expressed a rage not so much against the managers of Air France (how many of the people who expressed themselves thus can really have known the situation in any great detail?) but against the world. They were dissatisfied, therefore they were angry, therefore they were right. Their rage was cosmic, so to speak, and only momentarily directed at the managers of Air France. Tomorrow it will be directed at something else, but the emotion will be the same and just as strong. If the 2,900 employees of Air France were to get their jobs back tomorrow, it would not assuage the underlying fury, not in the slightest, not for a moment.

Read the whole piece here

I’m no expert, but this seems like a fairly large oversight:

The authors failed to notice a curious aspect of their results. The difference between the numbers of cigarettes smoked daily by the high- and low-nicotine groups was attributable not to a reduction in the number of cigarettes smoked by the latter group by comparison with their normal, pre-experiment levels, but by an increase in the number of cigarettes smoked by the former compared with their pre-experiment levels. Why this should have been the case is mysterious, but it was so.

Ours is an increasingly litigious society, one which financially encourages claimants to exaggerate their suffering. In a piece at Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple says the psychology behind the claimant’s exaggeration is often subtle:

Nobody likes to think of himself as dishonest, and so many a plaintiff comes to believe his own exaggerations. He feels obliged to suffer the suffering that he claims the wrong has done him, and even if he wins the case and receives the grotesquely inflated sum that he claimed, he feels obliged to go on suffering, for otherwise his own dishonesty would stand revealed to him. It is all a highly poisonous business.

Note: When Dalrymple’s long-running BMJ column ended in 2012, he had a backlog of around 50 or 60 unpublished pieces, and he kindly gave them to us to post here at Skeptical Doctor. We are posting one each Wednesday to coincide with the schedule of his old BMJ column. We hope you enjoy them.

Could it be, I wonder, that Mr Micawber derived his great dictum about happiness and misery from having read Edwin Chadwick’s Report to Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department from the Poor Law Commissioners, on an Inquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain of 1842, only five years before the publication of David Copperfield?

Dickens, after all, read such literature, and on pages 139 and 140 would have seen a tabulated comparison of those who lived providently and improvidently:

William Haynes, of Oakamoore (wire drawer), wages £1 per week; he has a wife and five children; he is in debt, and his family is shamefully neglected.

John Hammonds, of Woodhead (collier), wages 18s. per week; has six children to support; he is a steady man and saving money.

This great book is, to me at any rate, inexhaustibly fascinating. Chadwick was a barrister, not a doctor, and though most of his information came from doctors (unpaid for their work, incidentally) he had no exaggerated respect for their wisdom or understanding. Pages 148, for example, are headed Irrelevancy of Controversy on the Generation of Fever, as against Practical Means of Prevention. Contagion or infection, it was all the same to him; he was the Deng Xiao Ping of public health, to whom it mattered not whether the cat was black or white, so long as it caught mice. A note of impatience and exasperation creeps in:

The medical controversy as to the causes of fever; as to whether it is caused by filth and vitiated atmosphere, or whether the state of the atmosphere is a predisposing cause to the reception of the fever, or the means of propagating that disease, which has really some superior, independent, or specific cause, does not appear to be one that for practical purposes needs to be considered, except that its effect is prejudicial in diverting attention from the practical means of prevention.

And he quotes from an episode from a French report about the small town of Prades (through which, as it happens, I have often passed) in the Ariège, which suffered a disastrous epidemic:

The physicians of Ariège, in order to prove that the disease was not contagious, and to re-assure the inhabitants, lay in the beds from which the invalids had been removed.

Arguing for sanitary reform, Chadwick points out the advances made in the navy. In 1779 one in eight employed on ships died in a year; from 1830 to 1836, it was one in 72. This improvement he attributed to sanitary measures, even though he quotes the case of the expedition of HMS Centurion in which, a hundred years earlier, 200 of 400 men were lost to scurvy. It is interesting to note that although in the latter years lemon juice was by Chadwick’s time in general use, it was still uncertain in 1842 as to whether it, or better conditions in general, was responsible for the prevention of scurvy.

The book contains sanitary maps of Leeds and Bethnal Green of great beauty: were it not vandalism to do so, I would tear them out and frame them. And Chadwick provides illustrations of workmen’s housing, infinitely better, aesthetically-speaking, than almost anything built for the last hundred years. If there is one thing that has not improved, it is architecture.

Dalrymple’s second piece in this month’s New English Review is this enjoyable and quite down-to-Earth review of a performance of La Traviata:

For some reason, which is, perhaps, not difficult to fathom, directors of operas these days feel the need to make their mark by innovative productions, for example by setting Così fan tutte on the Moon, or The Flying Dutchman on Lake Titicaca, or The Barber of Seville in Nazi Germany. But of course they particularly like settings in the present, preferably in rather down-at-heel or dispiriting environs, to remind us that the opera, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, is of the deepest (which means radical) contemporary political significance, and was intended as such. And their view of the present, to judge by the scenery and costumes, is a somewhat dismal one, for elegance or refinement of appearance or behaviour is rigorously excluded. In Victorian times, one was supposed not to frighten the horses; these days one mustn’t frighten the proles.

This piece on Pope Francis’s speech before the U.S. Congress is the best thing I have read on the problem with the pontiff’s approach:

The Pope’s recent address to a joint session of Congress was greeted ecstatically, though (or perhaps because) it was notable mainly for its secular rather than for its religious pieties. It was the speech of a politician seeking re-election rather than that of the spiritual leader of a considerable part of mankind; as such, it seemed like the work not of a man intent upon telling the truth, however painful or unpopular, but that of a committee of speech-writers who sifted every word for its likely effect upon a constituency or audience, appealing to some without being too alienating of others. If ex-President Clinton had been elected Pope, he might have made the same speech, so perfect was its triangulation, so empty were its high-sounding phrases.

Pope Francis is not a subtle thinker, let alone a theologian of distinction…There was nothing of timelessness in what he said but only of the temporal, the contingent, the fashionably platitudinous. He is not a shepherd, but one of the sheep.

After another acid attack in Britain, Dalrymple comments on the Salisbury Review website on a subsequent news report:

The headline to a story in the Times of 29 September caught my eye:

‘Acid attacker drove 300 miles for revenge but got the wrong man’

Apparently, then, there was a right man to have got with his acid attack.

Dalrymple and his wife observed a young bird in distress at their French country home and wanted to help. From this he draws lessons on the crucial difference between good intentions and good acts.

There are many areas of life in which this lesson is important, particularly medicine, politics, controversy and private life. The desire to help, however genuine or burning, is not the same as actually helping…In other words, the urge to help should be kept under rational control, like any other urge, though not so completely that it withers all sympathy with suffering or all impulse to go to the assistance of anybody whatever his circumstances.

Disgusted by The Lancet’s self-congratulatory moral posturing, Dalrymple hangs them with their own rope – that is, their own words:

A new agenda for sexual and reproductive rights is needed that recognises the full scope of people’s sexual needs, and enables all people to choose whether, when, and with whom to engage in sexual activity; to choose whether and when to have children; and to access the means to do so in good health.

The words as quoted are a rapists’ charter; no perversion is too perverse to fall under its permissive rubric. There have been men who have been able to achieve orgasm only by derailing trains or by paddling their hands in the entrails of the people they have just killed: Ought the “full scope of [their] sexual needs” have been met? That people ought to be able to have sex when they choose, with whom they choose, entails that they should be able to force themselves on others even in public, for there can be no when without a corresponding where—for as we know, sexual desire (impossible to distinguish from need) does not always arise at moments hitherto considered appropriate. From the fate of children under this regime of unalienable rights to be included in the proposed Declaration of Sexual Rights it is best to avert one’s mind.

And this part speaks for many readers of this site, I’ll bet:

…virtue now consists almost entirely of mouthing the most approved opinions, demanding almost nothing of actual conduct, so that the more correct your views, and the more strongly you express them, the better person you are.

In the Salisbury Review Dalrymple wonders whether far-left British Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn’s sartorial incompetence is natural or contrived:

Our political choice seems to be between spivs and bores. I prefer spivs, but very marginally: moreover they often transmute.