I thought this was quite an interesting think-piece from the fairly reliably interesting and thought-provoking Nursing Clio:
Artificial Wombs and Decriminalizing Abortion Despite the fact that we are in the early days of this technology, and it may never be widely used, academics and journalists alike have been quick to argue that the artificial ( Read more... )

Dept of of, gender and sexuality, ORL B MOAR COMPLYK8D: Guillaume Gallienne was different from his three athletic brothers - he liked to dance and dress up as a woman. His mother treated him like a girl and told him he was gay. The thing is, he was actually heterosexual
Dept of, there are reasons for this: Home is where the greatest accident risk ( Read more... )

Further to my post yesterday apropos of 'annoying maverick' trope, and riffing off something I was reading (#iftoldyouidhavetokillyou), and a piece today about the kinds of people (i.e. celebs) who get awards and accolades for their charitable works: But you know who else does a lot for charity? People who work for charities every day. People ( Read more... )

Well, actually, after I had already sent the email to the media researcher saying 'not a historian of early modern medicine', and not saying, 'so not about the What did they really die of thing', the thought occurred to me -
- that with a very minimal amount of mugging up, me and the Famous Shirt could probably go on telly and sound pretty ( Read more... )

I am surely these 75% white, 100% male (I haven't calculated the average age - data isn't there - but suspect it would be above 40) group who form the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, are well-intentioned. But. We feel that their ponderings may be just a leeeetle skewed, hmmmmm?
These people are surely only boring if they insist on ( Read more... )

Or is it one of those other areas in which a current level of safety of very recent origin is deluding people, as with vaccination? It is well less than 100 years since a scary rate of maternal mortality began to decline.*

Freebirthing: is giving birth without medical support safe?

Okay, at least they are doing at home, with some kind of support, ( Read more... )

(Via a brief annotation, not online as far as I can see, in the Guardian G2 Comments and Features page this morning.)

Women could 'evolve' out of menopause and bear children later, says scientist

How is this something to be going yay about (which this scientist is)?

I cannot help feeling that the only people for whom this would be unqualified good ( Read more... )

I was rather impressed at Sheila Kitzinger's 'all more complicated' message re childbirth and interventions:
When I introduced birth plans to this country in the early 1980s, I thought it was very important that we think ahead to all the things that might happen in childbirth, because when we embark on birth, it's a bit like planning a picnic in ( Read more... )

The names of Warwick Deeping, Patrick Hamilton, Compton Mackenzie and Florence Barclay may be forgotten today - but they were all revered in the years between the First and Second World Wars when they formed the cornerstone of the literary mainstream.

I will concede (she concedes) that my having heard of any given early C20th novelist is no marker ( Read more... )

The actual science and epidemiology and so forth in this article may be fine, but given that there are 2 historical errors (which also contradict one another) about the history of penicillin and antibiotics, it makes me a bit sceptical about the whole thing.

Dr Livermore['s] grandmother died for lack of infection-killing drugs in 1945
She succumbed ( Read more... )