Notes to Iain Bamforth’s new book Scattered Limbs: A Medical Dream-Book
Category: Books
Endnotes to Scattered Limbs: A Medical Dreambook
SCATTERED LIMBS [Endnotes to Scattered Limbs: A medical dreambook Galileo 2020] [11] THE OTHER KIND OF HEALTH Inclusion of this now famous phrase of blankly utopian aspiration in the preamble to the WHO Constitution came at the prompting of its first Director-General Brock Chisholm (1896–1971), a Canadian psychiatrist and humanist. The Medical Garden, a collection…
Index to Scattered Limbs: A Medical Dreambook
INDEX OF TITLES A balm in GileadA big barrel of humanityA children’s songA Chinese syllogismA comedy in four actsA common causeAdded valueA divorceA dream of moist marbleA fatal lethargyA fig-leafA flower in the breastcageA fortunate stateAfter virtueAfter youAgainst decompositionAgainst entitlementsA genuflectionA glib philosophyA hagiographyA hard thingA hospital lightA lispAll the gasA loopholeA lost causeAlways at…
Liquidities
A review of two recent science-related books for a general readership Liquid: The Delightful and Dangerous Substances That Flow Through Our Lives by Mark Miodownik (Viking, 2018) Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Mysterious, Miraculous World of Blood by Rose George (Portobello, 2018) On opening Mark Miodownik’s new book Liquid I was startled to…
Bile with Style
In 2015, Suhrkamp Verlag published Werke in 22 Bänden, the definition edition of plays, novels and stories by the great Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, to commemorate his death twenty-five years previously. This review considers his life and work from the vantage of his novel Auslöchung, (1986), published in English translation as Extinction (1995). “How do…
Mad on Metrics
As the Indo-European languages tell us, medicine and religion have much in common, not least in offering a measure of salvation to the sinful. In her ambitious novel Corpus Delicti (English title: The Method), the socially committed German novelist Julie Zeh considers how much personal liberty we would be prepared to forego in a future…
Being Nice to Nietzsche
In his vagabondage around western Europe in the decade of white-hot creativity that was granted him after he resigned his chair in philology at the University of Basle, three other cities were of particular importance to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: Nice, Genoa and Turin—all cities with an Alpine background. The last of them impressed…
A Doctor’s Dictionary
A copy of A Doctor’s Dictionary can be pre-ordered directly from my publisher Carcanet Press, or through Amazon. In this pithy abecedarium, doctor and poet Iain Bamforth takes a close look at the conflict of values embodied in what we call medicine – never entirely a science and no longer quite the art it used to be….
Science & Letters 