The second of Galen’s four fluid humours of the body, φλέγμα, was associated, when in supposed excess, with a phlegmatic temperament, “not easily excited to feeling or action; stolidly calm, […]
Month: October 2016
Richard Smith: Finding meaning in life through neurosurgery
Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon, wanted badly to understand life and its meaning, and he knew that to do so he would need to understand death. So when in his 30s […]
Jeph Mathias: The human face of inequality
Long ago an MSF (Doctors Without Borders) poster transfixed one junior doctor. Me. It was black and white. Two figures, photographed from behind, dominate the foreground: a poor black child, […]
Canada’s new government: Climate change, “regulatory capture,” and “cathedral thinking”
It’s a year this month since Justin Trudeau was elected as Canada’s 23rd Prime Minister, ending a decade of conservative rule under Stephen Harper. By most accounts he has set […]
Humans of the NHS: Telling the stories of frontline NHS staff
“To save a life or to make it better for someone else is why I chose to do this job. The thanklessness of it, however, has never dissuaded me from […]
Chris Packham: The trouble with public health
People think public health is all (lecturing the masses on) sex, drugs, and alcohol. Even fellow clinicians tend to forget about defined roles such as the public health specialist. These individuals focus […]
“Our language is funny—a ‘fat chance’ and a ‘slim chance’ are the same thing”: Helping artificial intelligence understand patients
Google is in hot water. First of all, the artificial intelligence (AI) focused branch of the organization, Google DeepMind, recently held a public meeting on the hot topic of accessing […]
Mark Mikhail: The unsung hero of the Paralympic games
As the dust settles and we look back on an incredible Olympics followed by an even more successful Paralympics it is impossible to not be filled with admiration. We in […]
Claudia Stein: Europe is embracing the burden of disease approach
As readers of The BMJ, there’s a good chance you are familiar with the burden of disease (BoD) approach. BoD is a systematic scientific effort to quantify the comparative magnitude […]
Jonathan Roos: Let’s hear it for the case report
To date, more than 56 million papers have been published in the scientific literature. Astonishingly, printing out just the first page of each would create a stack almost 6km high—much […]