Medical involvement in torture looks like a category error. Medicine has to do with the healing of bodies and minds; torture with their destruction. It is now forty years since […]
Julian Sheather
Julian Sheather is specialist adviser (ethics and human rights), policy directorate, BMA.
Julian Sheather: Shaping the ends of our lives
Very difficult to know how we will approach our death until we are in the shadow of it. Will we hold to the ideals we formed when we were healthy, […]
Julian Sheather: Will the confluence of big data and the genomics revolution lead to a transformation in personalized healthcare?
Will the confluence of big data and the genomics revolution lead to a transformation in personalized healthcare, or are the emperors’ clothes looking a little threadbare? This was the theme […]
Julian Sheather: Torture, medicine, and the need for an independent eye
In August 2012, Claudia was woken at 3:00 in the morning when soldiers burst into her home in Veracruz City, Mexico. They tied her hands and blindfolded her. They took […]
Julian Sheather: The man whose mind exploded
Drako Oho Zarhazar has anterograde amnesia, a rare brain disorder that has left him unable to form new memories. The distant past—episodes from before the traumas that disabled his mind: […]
Julian Sheather: Public health and social power
It’s hard not to brood from time to time on some of the intractable public health problems that entangle us. Take obesity. Swimming with my boys over the weekend, I […]
Julian Sheather: Time to debate the ethics of robot care?
We take it for granted that compassion is at the heart of good care. But what if the hand that reaches out to yours is a robot’s? What if the […]
Julian Sheather: Ugandan anti-homosexuality legislation: bad law, bad science
For all the fanfare that headline science can generate, it is usually quiet science that arouses my sympathies. Carefully uncovered facts can settle like welcome oil, stilling the troubled waters […]
Julian Sheather: To see the world in a grain of wheat
Many years ago I was walking along Kilburn High Road with a sharp-eyed naturalist friend when he spotted an ear of domestic wheat growing in one of those squares of […]
Julian Sheather: Do younger doctors take more time off sick?
I’ve been doing some work recently with a GP trainer. I’m not a good judge of these things, but I would put him in his mid-fifties. He strikes me as […]