The grapheme <a> is used as a symbol for the phoneme /a/ when it is pronounced as the low front unrounded form of the vowel, as in the Scottish pronunciation […]
Columnists
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: other sciences, other images
PubMed accesses primarily the MEDLINE database of articles written about the life sciences but other sciences are represented too, even astrophysics. The first article turned up by searching black hole […]
Richard Smith: Is informed consent impossible at the end of life?
Informed consent is impossible at the end of life, said a British palliative care physician last week at a conference on Heybeliada, one of the Prince’s Islands in the Sea […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . The story of ough
Violet Elizabeth’s “croth-word puthle,” composed for William to solve in Richmal Crompton’s William—In Trouble (picture further below), contains two three lettered words crossing at the centre letters. The first clue […]
Desmond O’Neill: Surprised by beauty
Like most doctors, my conference schedule is usually mapped out well in advance, anticipating the complex leave requirements of trainees and colleagues in an ever busier department of geriatric and […]
William Cayley: To doctor is to diagnose
I appreciated Richard Smith’s recent discussion of mental models—too often, I think, we simply carry on with practice as usual (or, “life as usual”) without sufficient critical attention to the […]
Richard Smith: “Diagnose, treat, and cure” is largely dead
I don’t suppose that the people who taught me at medical school thought that they were promoting particular mental models. They were trying (and sadly failing) to make me the […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Medical logos
“Grapheme” is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “The class of letters and other visual symbols that represent a phoneme or cluster of phonemes” and “in a given writing […]
Richard Smith: Time for GPs to be leaders not victims
General practitioners are overworked, underappreciated, and perhaps underpaid. Politicians are unsympathetic to their plight and expecting more of them. Hospital doctors dump work on them. Nurses are after their jobs. […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: human to animal
The Rorschach inkblot test, used for psychological profiling and introduced in 1921, is well known, even if now little used. Few know of a similar test that was introduced in […]