Snippets

Snippets

I have three very talented daughters – two with a design inclination and one a General Practice medic who combines that with teaching medical students in Edinburgh. So this post is for all of them. Although the focus this time is mainly medical, I will deal with design in a future post

1. Photos of Scotland in the 1930s. A woman GP on the Hebrides took these wonderful photos which can currently be viewed at an exhibition in Edinburgh. 

2. The European Union has just developed a new partnership on health with the World Health Organisation. WHO has come in for some criticism recently but I have to say that I have a lot of respect for it – having seen it at close quarters for 6 months in 1990/91 when I was invited to help the head of its European Division of Public Health develop a strategy for central europe. I have never seen such a lean and effective organisational system – with one person, a secretary and a small budget dealing very effectively with, respectively, drugs, smoking, maternity and healthy cities

3. Lea Ypi has been making quite an impact with her recent book on Free – coming of age at the end of history which recounts – through the various members of her family – the diverse ways in which they interpreted what was happening to their society before and after 1989. French TV had this lovely documentary of her revisiting her family home in Albania

4. Martin Wolf has a more interesting background than you might imagine from his sobriquet as lead financial journalist at the Financial Times – his family having fled from Nazi Austria. After an initial stint at the World Bank where he became disillusioned with McNamara’s policies, he fell under the influence of Hayekian thinking and wrote positively about globalisation. His latest book “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism” warns against the “UK creep toward authoritarianism“ which he explores in this great interview

5. Dr John Campbell. This guy has been the daily voice of reason on Youtube for the past 3 years on Covid and ran very useful tutorials on health topics for years before – although the Wikipedia link throws some doubt on some of his claims. I began to worry about his judgement when he appeared on the Neil Oliver show a month ago. Oliver was a bit of a Scottish historian but has become a rabid conspiracy theorist in the past couple of years - and Campbell was most ill-advised to appear on the programme.

This broadcast on depression is a welcome break from his fixation on Covid which encouraged me to upload to his site (which attracts some 5000 mainly US comments a day!) a link to Johann Hari's great book on Lost Connections

6. Saying Goodbye; A friend of mine lost his wife recently. It was the end of Alastair Campbell’s most recent The Rest is Politics which reminded me of Jacques Brel’s powerful “Do not Leave me”