For a number of years I used to write a weekly column in the British Medical Journal about medicine and literature. The field, of course, was vast, inexhaustible, because medicine deals with birth and death and everything in between—as does literature. Many doctors have taken to the pen, a surprising number of great writers had doctors for fathers (Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, and Proust, to name but three), doctors appear frequently as characters in literature, and scenes of illness are likewise very common, some accurate and some preposterous. Whole libraries, or at least bookshelves, have been written about Shakespeare and medicine. While I was … Continue reading Politics Is Criminal