It was reported a couple of days ago that Ray Gosling was to face charges of wasting police time after having made certain statements on a TV programme about the death of a partner – statements that the police subsequently investigated and that led to his arrest for murder in February. The charge of wasting […]
Month: August 2010
Conference Report: ESPMH, Zagreb
Guest post by Nathan Emmerich. This year the annual conference of the European Society for the Philosophy of Medicine and Healthcare (ESMPH) was held in the Andrija Stampar School of Public Health, University of Zagreb. Participants came from across Europe for the four day event which was focussed on Human Nature. Many of the presenters […]
The Pro-Life Car-Wreck
You need to have registered to read the BMA News, and that would seem to require BMA registration – which is a shame, because I heard a rumour of a rantable letter that appeared there in June. A reformed medic friend has been good enough to copy and paste it for me. The rumour’s true. […]
Housekeeping…
The comments moderation system here has changed over the last few days and I don’t know how to work it yet. If a comment you’ve tried to make since about Friday has disappeared, could you let me know via the email address in my profile? I worry about this because we usually get 5 or […]
Let’s hope he only paid a fraction of the postage…
Xtaldave, who does things with science here at the University of Manchester, has found a vacancy for a job working as an NHS homeopath in Tayside – a trust that has just had to shed 500 real jobs. Manchester is nice, but Tayside is nicer, and the pay is excellent. Naturally, he’s applied for it. […]
When being the Worst-Off isn’t the Worst
For a little over a year now I’ve been tinkering with a paper on the brain drain – that phenomenon by which expertise migrates from poorer to wealthier areas – and how we should think about it from a moral point of view. Earlier drafts have been inflicted on attendees at the “New Directions in […]
Who Ya Gonna Call?
Here’s a short story about the evolution of modern science: we used to understand very little about the world, and lacked the means to understand it. But we wanted to know how it worked, and we invented things like gods and demons to explain phenomena. As we gradually learned more and more about the way […]
Professor Richard Ashcroft’s Inaugural Lecture: ‘The Republic of Health – Ethics and Politics in 21st Century Healthcare’
A link to a podcast of Professor Richard Ashcroft’s belated inaugural lecture can be found here: The Republic of Health – Ethics and Politics in 21st Century Healthcare And since Richard is one of JME’s deputy editors I thought some folk might be interested. The abstract is below the fold. […]
Does the Taliban have a Mexican Wing?
The Mexican state of Guanajuato has some very strict abortion laws: terminating a pregnancy attracts a three-year prison sentence. However, it would appear that prosecutors occasionally up the ante by bringing a charge of homicide, which brings a much more severe sentence; thus six women have been given 25-30 year sentences for having an abortion. According to […]
WCB 2010: The Post-Mortem
SO… For those of you who’ve just spent four Singaporean days braving fierce heat and humidity outside and fierce air-conditioning inside, how was it for you? What were the hits and misses of this year’s WCB? I’ll start the ball rolling: I particularly enjoyed Anthony Wrigley’s paper on proxy proxies, and am looking forward to […]