The medical conferences to which Dalrymple is occasionally invited all sound the same: dull, dishonest and devoid of meaning.
The latest conference on medical leadership has eighty speakers and lasts three days. The organizers seem to believe that the longer the conference and the larger the number of speakers on so patently dull a subject, the more impressive it is, no doubt in the way that a big box of chocolates impresses a greedy person more than a small one. All things considered, however, I’d rather stay at home and read the collected works of Kim Il Sung: to which, indeed, the conference bears a striking resemblance.