It is a long time since I studied art history, but if I remember rightly the invention of photography is said to have contributed to the exhaustion of the realist […]
Julian Sheather
Julian Sheather is specialist adviser (ethics and human rights), policy directorate, BMA.
Julian Sheather: Free NHS care for asylum seekers
It runs like an uneasy theme in the ethics of health care provision. How do we respond to the genuine health needs of individuals who do not have legal rights […]
Julian Sheather: Worshipping the sun
I am forty-four. Even allowing for the decade or so that modern medicine has added to our Biblical three score years and ten, I am, statistically, over half way through […]
Julian Sheather on making mistakes
When I was a child I had three basic approaches to making a mistake. Firstly I would run away as far as possible and pretend it hadn’t happened. […]
Julian Sheather: Is Prozac destroying the arts?
Do art and misery share a bed? Although we might expect art to entertain and even, at a push, to improve its audience, artists themselves are surely supposed to suffer. […]
Julian Sheather: Is depression a problem of meaning or of medicine?
In a recent article in the BMJ Paul Biegler returns to a familiar theme in some of the more reflective literature on depression. Should an episode of depression be seen […]
Julian Sheather on the Wellcome exhibition “Life Before Death”
Jannik Boehmfeld is dead. He is six years old, a year younger than my eldest son. He is lying on his back. His mouth is open but his eyes are […]
Julian Sheather: Does art make people better doctors?
Recently a colleague of mine, a GP, told me she was taking a three-month sabbatical. She was going to sit on an island in the Mediterranean and do very little […]