Review of Daniel Pick’s Svengali’s Web: the alien enchanter in modern culture:

The intricate complicity between symptoms and cures – and

between what people are considered to be suffering from and

what they claim to be suffering from – has made the history of

medicine, in its broadest sense, of so much recent interest. Part

of the fascination (so to speak) of mesmerism and hypnosis –

and of the history that is so well told in Svengali’s Web – is that,

as potential cures for a wide range of miseries, they were so

quickly seen to be at once remarkable breakthroughs, and

disreputable, if not criminal activities.

The reviewer wonders what it is about psychoanalysis that keeps it from being another form of hypnosis, if indeed it is not; and whether hypnosis shows that seducing and being seduced are the only things we are truly free to do, “making a mockery of our ideas of freedom.”

The impossible world of DI John Rebus. A London Review of Books essay surveys Ian Rankin’s appealing, encyclopedic series of crime novels featuring a gritty Scottish detective.

The sheer

range of subjects treated in the novels is one of the keys to their

interest. John Rebus, born in irritation at the self-ghettoising of

the literary novel, grew into a highly effective tool for describing

and engaging with modern Scotland. Rankin does not indulge

any temptation to play formal games with his character. There is

no ludic or ironic component to the series, just as there is none

to Rebus himself; the books do not experiment with the

crime-novel form, and do not make any kind of distancing or

Post-Modern gestures towards it. A writer who began by trying

to write a book his father might want to read found himself, after

the publication of Dead Souls, occupying eight of the top ten

positions in the Scottish bestseller list.

Memorable journalistic bloopers submitted by readers to Jim Romenesko’s Media News.

Two-faced kitten dies unexpectedly in Pennsylvania. “Image, the…kitten that received

a good prognosis for survival even though he

was born with two sets of eyes, two mouths

and two noses, died yesterday morning in his

quilt-lined bed…Aside from his

facial features, the rest of the kitten seemed

normal. The two mouths opened in unison but

were attached to one esophagus. Image has one

head, two ears and one set of lungs.” The kitten was too young for its four eyes to have yet opened, rendering moot the fascinating question of how it would have seen the world.

Flawed process leads to executions in Texas despite Bush’s vows of confidence in the system. The Chicago Tribune conducted the first comprehensive investigation of all 131 executions in Texas under Bush’s tenure and concludes that scandalous flaws undermine the process of capital convictions there. As a psychiatrist, I’m particularly appalled by the abuse of psychiatric expert testimony:

In at least 29 cases, the prosecution presented

damaging testimony from a psychiatrist who,

based upon a hypothetical question describing

the defendant’s past, predicted the defendant

would commit future violence. In most of

these cases, the psychiatrist offered this

opinion without ever examining the

defendant. Although this kind of testimony is

sometimes used in other states, the American

Psychiatric Association has condemned it as

unethical and untrustworthy.

Other failings included representation in one-third of the cases by an attorney later disbarred, suspended or otherwise sanctioned; and the frequent use of jailhouse informants (“a form of testimony so unreliable

that some states warn jurors to view it with

skepticism. The prevalent use of jailhouse

informants in capital cases was one of the

central problems Gov. George Ryan cited when

he declared the moratorium in Illinois”). Witnesses, experts and lawyers on whose contributions capital convictions have turned have included

a forensic scientist who was

temporarily released from a psychiatric ward

to provide incriminating testimony in a capital

case; a pathologist who has admitted faking

autopsies; a psychiatrist, nicknamed “Dr.

Death,” who was expelled from the American

Psychiatric Association; a judge on the state’s

highest criminal court who has been

reprimanded for lying about his background;

and a defense attorney infamous for sleeping

during trials.

This all ought to be disturbing regardless of whether one supports the death penalty or not in the abstract. Let’s elect George W. to the presidency just to get him out of the role of signing death warrants in Texas, for God’s sake!

New heights of intrusiveness from the Census Bureau.

“I work for the federal government and I’ll do what I have to do to do my job,” says arrested census worker.

Controlled infection “A live HIV vaccine that can’t infect the people it’s supposed to protect may be possible after all. A team based in

California has created a hybrid of HIV and another virus that can enter cells, but can’t replicate once it’s there. ” Not really a vaccine as much as immunotherapy for those already HIV-infected; introduced to the patient through an arduous process, to prime the patient’s cell-mediated immune response. [New Scientist]