Breakthroughs announced in the media are rarely breakthroughs. Disasters rarely prove as disastrous as when first splashed in the media. I kept both these Kipling-esque thoughts in mind when nearly […]
Columnists
Andy Cowper: Hope of a covid-19 vaccine is good news, but comes with many uncertainties
The announcement on Monday of a covid-19 vaccine candidate feels as if it has changed the game in dealing with covid-19. According to a press release of the Phase III study, […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Nobel prizes in pharmacology—James Black
The biomedical words whose earliest recorded written instances are dated 1974 in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) are listed in Table 1; as before, pharmacological words contribute the single largest […]
Billy Boland: How has New Zealand been so successful in managing covid-19?
Jacinda Ardern won the New Zealand elections by a “historic landslide.” The result in part has been credited to the success of her management of coronavirus in the country. The […]
Peter Brindley: Covid-19 fatigue and “masking” how we feel
Covid-19’s second wave is upon us, and it could easily turn into a tsunami. I want patients to know that healthcare professionals are still here for you. Use whatever maritime […]
Andy Cowper: Johnson is late to lockdown—yet again
To the considerable surprise of very few people, on Saturday 31 October, the UK’s prime minister Boris Johnson announced a second national lockdown in England, to halt the increased spread […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Nobel prizes in pharmacology—John Vane
This week I have reached 1973 in my exploration of the biomedical words whose first known written instances have been listed in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in individual years […]
Daniel Sokol on William Osler’s legacy and medical ethics
This is a version of a lecture given to the Osler Club of London and the British Society for the History of Medicine on 1st October 2020 as part of […]
Mary E Black: Plastic waste from PPE does not need to happen
My daughter calls on WhatsApp. Through the summer of 2018 she spent hours staring down a microscope to distinguish fly wings from plastic films, and fish eggs from plastic pellets. […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . False positives and the Ulysses syndrome
Last week I listed the biomedical words whose first known written instances listed in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) date from 1971. This week I have explored 1972 (Table 1). […]