This May, our 2016 Clinical Placement Competition came to a close. In partnership with Projects Abroad, we offered one lucky medical student the chance to practice their clinical skills, with £2,000 towards a clinical placement in a country of their choice. We asked entrants to send a photograph with a caption, explaining “What does being a doctor mean to you?”
The post Announcing the winner of the 2016 Clinical Placement Competition appeared first on OUPblog.
I LOVE this post by #YAlit author Ava Jae On The Lack of Chronic Illness Rep In YA, and I’m honored that she included Parallel Visions in her list. We need to change the message that’s out there in YA lit for chronically ill teens: that their stories are only worth telling if they die or have a miracle cure. Chronically ill kids and teens can be heroes in their own right. I wrote Parallel Visions after getting asthma. It’s terrifying to feel like you can’t breathe. But chronic disease has nothing to do with us being strong, intelligent, empathic beings who can be heroes and have adventures, too.
Read her fantastic post, book suggestions, and reader comments on more book suggestions.
When medical conditions affect children or the people in their lives, one of the most daunting aspects of their situation is how to cope. The management of a disease or disability is one thing, the understanding why they have it and why others react the way they do is another. Picture books are marvellous non-invasive […]
. Malcolm Finney Medical Detective – The Case of… Itch and Rash by Erika Kimble illustrated by Laurel Winters Bandages & Boo-Boos Press 4 Stars Back Cover: Malcolm Finney, Medical Detective Series: The Case of Itch and Rash, is an adventurous story that explores the skin disease called eczema. It is a book that teaches …
Mark Jackson is Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter. His newest work, Asthma: The Biography, is a volume in our series Biographies of Disease which we will be looking at for the next few week (read previous posts in this series here). Each volume in the series tells the story of a disease in its historical and cultural context – the varying attitudes of society to its sufferers, the growing understanding of its causes, and the changing approaches to its treatment. In the excerpt below Jackson relays the story of Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Ball Company.
On 7 December 1889, an American inventor, Frederick Augustus Roe, obtained a patent for a device that was designed both to cure and to prevent not only the deadly strain of influenza that was sweeping across Europe 
from Russia, but also a wide range of other respiratory complaints, including catarrh, bronchitis, coughs and colds, croup, whooping cough, hay fever and asthma. Sold from offices in Hanover Square in London for ten shillings, the Carbolic Smoke Ball comprised a hollow ball of India rubber containing carbolic acid powder. When the ball was compressed, a cloud of particles was forced through a fine muslin or silk diaphragm to be inhaled by the consumer. Boosted by testimonials from satisfied customers and endorsements from prominent doctors, Roe was sufficiently confident that the contraption would prevent influenza that, in several advertisements placed in the Illustrated London News and the Paul Mall Gazette during the winter of 1891, he offered to pay £100 to any person who contracted influenza ‘after having used the ball 3 times daily for two weeks according to the printed descriptions supplied with each ball’. As if to demonstrate the sincerity of his offer, Roe claimed to have deposited £1,000 with the Alliance Bank in Regent Street.
In November 1891, Louisa Elizabeth Carlill, the wife of a lawyer, purchased a Carbolic Smoke Ball in London and carefully followed the instructions for use. When Mrs Carlill contracted influenza the following January, her husband wrote to Roe claiming the ‘reward’ offered in the advertisements. Suggesting that the claim was fraudulent, Roe refused to pay and provided Mr Carlill with the names of his solicitors. In the resulting legal case, initially heard in the court of Queen’s Bench and subsequently reviewed by Appeal Court, the dispute did not revolve primarily around whether the plaintiff had used the device correctly or indeed whether or not she had contacted influenza; these issues were accepted largely as fact. Rather, legal arguments focused on whether the advertisement constituted a valid offer, rather than ‘a mere puff’, as Lord Justice Bowen neatly put it, and whether Mrs Carlill’s use of the smoke ball constituted acceptance of that offer. By deciding unanimously in Mrs Carlill’s favour, the English courts set a precedent regarding unilateral contracts that continued to inform the legal doctrines of offer and acceptance, consideration, misrepresentation, and wagering throughout the twentieth century.
While Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Ball Company became a celebrated moment in legal history, it al
Sorry about that -- I got so irritated with trying to blog by email that I stopped. Now all is well technically, and I thought the world deserved a proper blog entry, albeit a short one.
The Graveyard Book is back on track, I think, and the thorny and evil thicket that was Chapter Six has been traversed and, I am told, does not sound like I was making it up as I went along, but sounds as if I knew what it was about the whole time. This makes me happy, because it was miserable writing it.
Chapter Seven is being written right now, I'm enjoying writing it and I do sort of know where it's going (I have for years) but it seems to be willing to surprise me anyway. A dead poet that I wasn't expecting just showed up, named Nehemiah Trot, who has "Swans Sing Before They Die" on his tombstone, and, I hope, will never know why.
(It won't be explained in the text, so it's from a quote I'd heard attributed to Pope, but is actually from Coleridge, alluding to the belief that swans sing most loudly and beautifully just before they die, which goes,
Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.
And leads me to believe that Nehemiah Trot was not considered much of a poet by the people who buried him.)
I am, as I said, really enjoying it.
Having said that, there are a bunch of introductions to things I agreed to write with end of January deadlines (as I was certain that I'd be done the The Graveyard Book by then) that are a bit of a distraction.
The Writer's Strike continues. I was delighted that the Weinstein Company has just made a deal with the WGA, agreeing to all the terms, as that means I can now go back to work on the Neverwhere movie. (A short history -- I wrote about eight drafts of Neverwhere-the-movie between 1997 and 2000, and then retired. Other people came in and wrote scripts, some of which were hated and some of which weren't, but it died. Last year my agents sent someone who asked about it the version of the script they had, which was the last draft script I did in 2000, and people read it, got excited and suddenly it came back to life, with the Hensons producing and doing it with the Weinstein Company. It needs to find a director, but at least I can work on it now.)
...
One very frequently asked question here is Can I Recommend a Book For A Young Reader? And the answer really is, no, I can't, not without knowing the Young Reader in question. Different people like different books, and age isn't much of a guide to that. But what I can now do is point anyone at this rather wonderful Daily Telegraph list of 100 booksevery child should read, broken into three sections (young, middle and older readers). It's a terrific list, and I say that as someone who's read to myself, or read aloud, many of the books they suggest, and not just because they've got Coraline on there.
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There's an article on Stephin Merritt in the New York Times.
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People have asked if I want to get one of the new lightweight Macs. And I shall, I expect, but I'll wait for them to have been around for a generation before I do. (It always seems the wisest course of action not to nip out and buy Mac stuff when they first release it. The travails of Holly's first generation MacBook is the most recent example in my family of ignoring that rule.)
Also, I'd like it to be a bit lighter still. I wish my new Panasonic W7 was lighter, and it's about 8 ounces less than the new Macs.
...
Neil, on 27 December, you said, There would be a lot more White German Shepherds around if the Nazis hadn't decided they were racially inferior and needed to be cleansed from the gene pool. Of course, the same could be said of my family. Howcome you don't talk about that side of your family?
Normally because it's not something I think about, nor something I'm comfortable with, and it rarely works its way into conversation.
I remember the first time I really became aware of what happened in World War Two was when, aged about 11, I had to do a family tree as a school project. This was only twenty five years after the end of the war -- not a long time, not really, although to me it was an age, and WW2 was ancient history. I discovered as I drew the family tree and talked to relatives that, for the most part, my family, in Poland and Germany and all over Eastern Europe, went into concentration camps and didn't come out. On my paternal grandfather's side alone, a huge extended family was mostly reduced to my great-grandfather and his children, who had come to England, and three sisters from Radomsko in Poland, who survived by fortune and their wits.
One of those sisters was my cousin, the remarkable Dr Helen Fagin, [she was my grandfather's first cousin -- my great-grandfather was her uncle], and has been honoured by New College of Florida in Sarasota for her work in Holocaust Education.
Like Fagin's writings and teachings, the 1,000-volume collection emphasizes what she calls "the moral lessons" of the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews.
"While it is important to learn about the Holocaust," she says, "it is even more important that we learn from the Holocaust."
The most chilling of those lessons, to her, is that extermination, civilization's ultimate betrayal of its own humanity, was the work of highly civilized people.
"These were educated, erudite individuals, thinkers, who came to the conclusion that the final solution was perfectly plausible.
"And then they were able to enlist the help of chemists to devise an efficient gas for extermination, and architects to design an efficient death house, and industrialists to create the machinery of annihilation."
The lesson of the Holocaust is not that human beings are "somehow capable of resigning from their human obligations to one another," she says, but that "they do so out of conscious moral choice."
And she's right -- although as I said in
American Gods, the worst part, for me, is that some, perhaps many of the people who killed my family and six million others had, I have no doubt, convinced themselves that they were good people doing the right thing.
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