About

This is a place for things I read, write, and do. Generally within the themes of medicine, technology, books, and early twentieth century medical texts.

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Posts - Low-Background Lexicography

Salting the Earth with Artificial Intelligence

Almost 79 years ago, in the deserts of New Mexico, atoms were torn apart, releasing colossal amounts of energy, and very importantly not igniting the atmosphere causing nuclear armageddon. Can you tell I’ve watched Oppenheimer recently? Politics, ethics, and morality aside, the 16th of July 1945 is a watershed moment in time. However, we may be standing at another brink in human history, and one that may have a reach further than nuclear fission.

Posts - Be Kind to be Cruel

The thorny issue of the GMC enforcing kindness

The General Medical Council wants doctors to be kind, and when the GMC wants doctors to be something, they add it to their set of standards, Good Clinical Practice. On the face of it, this doesn’t sound like it would be too controversial – who wouldn’t want their doctor to be kind? However, this has engendered a slew of discussion, critique, and in some cases, fear.

Posts - Hunterian Revisited

A tour through London's finest glass jar emporium

Like many an aspiring doctor1, in my youth I undertook the pilgrimage to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. As London’s finest emporium of grisly things in jars, there was always plenty to entertain, and plenty to inflict on the squeamish. After a long-awaited revamp, delayed slightly by COVID, this Mecca of the medically inclined has reopened at last. The museum originated as the private collection of John Hunter, an 18th Century eccentric and surgeon (tautology).

Posts - The Legality of Long Pig

Can you consent to your own cannibalism?

Medical professionals should not be allowed to congregate in public; that’s my stance, and I am sticking to it. When they do, conversation invariably tends gruesome topics such as rotas, frustrating colleagues, and human cannibalism — apologies to the other patrons of La Terra in Bath last Saturday.

Books - Anaesthesia and the Practice of Medicine

Historical Perspectives

To those of us who’ve begun to dip our toes in the history of anaesthesia, the sordid days of ether frolicks, feuds, and misadventures in dental extractions are rather familiar. Involvement in the early phase of inhalation anaesthesia seems to have carried with it an astonishing self-inflicted mortality rate. However, what I’ve enjoyed most about Anaesthesia and the Practice of Medicine: Historical Perspectives, is about what happens next.