The snooze of reason, if not actual sleep

[oursin]

Doctor prescribed crosses to beat black magic, tribunal told:
The patient, Mrs K, attended the Westside Contraceptive Clinic in Westminster, London, for a contraceptive injection after complaining of pain and bleeding. But the panel was told that Dr Pratt claimed to have special powers and gave her stones and crosses to protect her. She allegedly

Comments

[chickenfeet2003]

I'm really coming around to the view that it's time for rational people to stop pussy footing about the harm organised religion is doing to public life. If people want to believe superstitious nonsense in their spare time that's OK but it's time we stopped wasting public money on superstition based schools and declared a no tolerance policy for unscientific crap in the science classroom.

[green_knight]

It's an ongoing trend. When I came from a German university to a British one, my concept of geography turned out to be terribly old-fashioned. Admittedly, my teacher's teacher was one of the founding fathers of the modern subject, but while I was in Germany, I was perfectly middle-of-the-road. Geography, at least until 1996 when I left, was a subject that's combining science (physical geography) and ... well, human geography. Which borrows from a variety of subjects in its methodologies; but places great emphasis on finding 'the truth' and tests, wherever possible, and asks for proof, and is alltogether very sceptical. Being objective was high on the agenda

[chickenfeet2003]

I've heard similar stories from archaeologists. I'm not sure what to make of it. Partly it seems to be that some academic disciplines (or subsections of them) have completely isolated themselves from any other aspect of the human project and are just playing a self-referential game for their own benefit. Some balance to be struck between 'academic freedom' and 'common sense'? I really don't know.

[tree_and_leaf]

I remember one of the Anglican chaplains at St Andrews, who was also a lecturer in biology, being driven to despair by fundamentalist undergraduates (generally JYAs from Kansas) who refused to believe that science had anything to say about the formation of the planet or the development of life. I think they just wrote him down as a heretic.

[tree_and_leaf]

Having read the story, I incline to the view that the doctor was probably mentally ill, but it's rather disturbing. Though I would have been very surprised if anyone at Westminster Cathedral, had the patient presented herself there, would have said anything other than, get a second opinion at once... (from a doctor, I mean, not an exorcist)