Donald Berwick recognised by the Queen. I know I am usually expressing cynical sentiments about the state of modern healthcare and its practitioners; you may be pleased to know I recognize that there are exceptions. I’ve just read Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains and am tremendously inspired by Paul Farmer’s work; with his quirkiness and idiosyncracy, he’s no saint but perhaps the closest one can come in the modern world. Although I have never run across his work before, here is another Boston-area physician, Donald Berwick, who seems to be doing real good. If not sainthood, at least knighthood…
Daily Archives: 17 Aug 05
True to Life
A review of philospher Michael Lynch’s True to Life: why truth matters:
“Truth is objective. It is good to believe what is true. Truth is a worthy goal of inquiry. Truth is worth caring about for its own sake.
These are simple statements but they don’t express the principles that most of us follow in our private lives. They aren’t followed in culture and politics, and have been unpopular in the history of philosophy. Few people are constantly, absolutely, painfully truthful. Many people are careless with the truth in many of their words and deeds. Most people don’t trust politicians, advertisers, friends, and lovers to be truthful all the time. There are several lines of philosophical theory that have been skeptical of the possibility of knowing the truth, or cynical about the value of knowing the truth. These academic notions have penetrated popular culture and affect the way people act and talk. Many of the people who have had the benefit of a modern education have adopted post-modern theories that postulate that truth is simply an aspect of a story or theory (a narrative or meta-narrative), and that truth only exists if you choose to live within such a story.” (Blogcritics )
Lynch argues that we should be far more concerned that we are slipping in our commitment to truth.
Warning: Outsider Art
“An increasingly popular movement in the visual arts prides itself on picturing everything that is the raw, untutored, and irrational. ” (WBUR) I don’t know about popular, but I have long been an observer and sometimes collector of raw art, in part because of my work as a psychiatrist. One idea in art brut is that the often compulsive and spontaneous artistic production of “outsiders” (i.e. those disconnected from exposure to the artistic conventions of the cultural mainstream, and certainly untutored in artistic technique, including the mentally ill and developmentally disabled) has an often overwhelming power and pathos, as well as a grace and subtlety, of unmediated and unshaped expressiveness. By the way, if you are ever in Lausanne, do not miss a trip to the Collection de l’Art Brut, the museum of outsider art started by Jean Dubuffet.
No Pedestrian Spiral Galaxy
The Milky Way is a rare and beautiful barred spiral, not one of those more common ordinary spiral galaxies it has always been thought to be, according to a new survey of the starts at the center of our galaxy. Will proponents of intelligent design take heart?
Darwin-Awards Winner?
“Tim Wilson said he and his wife did not know their daughter had been engaging in the practice.” (The Kansas City Channel) Sorry to be callous, I know it is tragic and I am sorry for her parents’ loss, but the practice seems so… stupid!
Salon puts The Well on auction block
Deep within this C/NET article on Salon’s fiscal woes, however, is an even more troubling comment from its new CEO about plans that Salon itself will change from “something akin to a print magazine with articles posted online to a more interactive Web site.”
Loyal Catholics Will Surely Shoot the Messenger…
…since it is The Guardian reporting that:
“lawyers for Pope Benedict XVI have asked President Bush to declare the pontiff immune from liability in a lawsuit that accuses him of conspiring to cover up the molestation of three boys by a seminarian in Texas, court records show.
…Joseph Ratzinger is named as a defendant in the civil lawsuit. Now Benedict XVI, he’s accused of conspiring with the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston to cover up the abuse during the mid-1990s. The suit is seeking unspecified monetary damages.
In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Gerry Keener, said Tuesday that the pope already is considered a head of state and automatically has diplomatic immunity. Keener said Benedict doesn’t have to ask for immunity and Bush doesn’t have to grant it.”
(If you’re supposedly Papally infallible, why do you need to ask for immunity, by the way??)
Mistakes led to tube shooting
It seems that nearly everything London officials said to excuse the Tube killing of Charles De Menezes was a misrepresentation, according to docuemnts and photographs leaked to ITV. (“They all look alike…”)
