Surgery for breakfast
A friend, recently returned from a city-break in Budapest, reported it wonderful in every respect. The only shock was the hotel breakfast menu: instead of the anticipated eggs benedict, croissants and coffee, she was confronted with dental implants, tear-drop breasts...
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Older and cared for
Recently I was gently but clearly reprimanded in my local pharmacy. I had gone with my chicken-poxy child to buy some anti-itch ointment. Sweden, like the UK, does not routinely vaccinate children against the varicella zoster virus. ‘It’s very contagious,...
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Counting the cost of heroic surgical intervention
The practice of medicine involves interesting contradictions. In the name of treatment, clinicians regularly inflict pain on people who are already suffering. Medicine promises to alleviate pain in the long-term through an intervention that exacerbates it. Such is the strength...
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‘Akuten’
King’s College Hospital currently has an appeal for funds which urges us to text a five pound donation to ‘improve the life-saving care we provide for our patients’. Hospitals used to be state funded. As insidious as the implication that...
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Madness and Morality
‘He’s a narcissistic pervert’ she said. ‘And I should know; my mother was one too!’ Emilia was sober, while the rest of the guests were not. She had just announced to the assembled dinner party that her son had been...
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Waiting for the Xenografts…
David Hamilton 2012 A History of Organ Transplantation. Ancient Legends to Modern Practice. University of Pittsburgh Press. Transplant surgery holds a certain fascination, both for its potential to restore a broken human body and for the prospect of Frankenstein-horrors that...
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Much ado about nothing?
Shakespeare. Staging the World British Museum exhibition: 19 July to 25 November 2012 This exhibition seeks to create a dialogue between the imaginary worlds of Shakespeare’s plays and objects from the actual world that he and his contemporary audiences inhabited....
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Idiot’s guide to ethical publishing in a competitive world.
Pay walls preventing access to research funded by tax-payers: bad. Open access publishing: good. Greedy multi-national publishers with high profit margins: bad. Academics working for greedy publishers for free: absurd. Individual academics declaring boycott of greedy publishers: good. Academics’ collective...
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Funny bodies
Stelarc is the artist who grew an ear on his arm. Growing an ear on your arm should be funny, right? Stelarc (originally Stelios Arcadiou) explores how bodies can be liberated from familiar limitations and opened up as a host...
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Holiday parasites and furry friends