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Doctor Who fans have long been known for making fun of the programme that they love so much. As Paul Cornell states in his collection of excerpts from print fanzines, fan discourses often contain ‘oddly fond but also mocking bits’ ( 1997 : 117). He goes on to say that such ‘bits’ (examples of which include tongue-in-cheek or satirical articles, cartoons and jokes, fake news reports and agony aunt columns, or silly poems, and sometimes even entire ’zines dedicated to mockery) demonstrate a ‘very complicated
5 Mad doctors: lunacy and the asylum Medical practitioners who were deemed by their nineteenth-century contemporaries to be suffering from severe mental-health problems frequently warranted an asylum admission.1 The supposed causes of their complaints covered the same range as for non-medical patients, in that these were ascribed to contextual causes – such as overwork, domestic disharmony, financial troubles – and to physical or moral causes including opiate addiction, alcohol consumption, heredity, and masturbation.2 However, medical patients were different
14.1 In this chapter, we examine the law governing doctors’ relationships with child patients. The courts are often asked to determine the fate of sick children when doctors and parents disagree about how best to care for the child. Several cases have attracted much publicity. In two recent cases parents sought to protect their children, who suffered from malignant brain tumours, from the adverse effects of radiotherapy. The parents of 5-year-old Ashya King removed him from hospital and sought alternative treatment abroad. The hospital feared for Ashya
1 The Doctors Club: politeness, sociability and the culture of medico-gentility As to the general character of a physician’s manners, I see no reason why they should be different from those of a gentleman. J. Gregory, Observations on the Offices and Duties of a Physician (1770)1 I n 1763 the p reamb le to the local Cleaning and Lighting Act announced that York was the ‘Capital City of much of the Northern Parts of England . . . a place of great Resort, and much frequented by Persons of Distinction and Fortune’.2 Though undoubtedly coloured by the rhetorical
2.1 When we are ill we want to be treated by competent doctors – that is why debates about regulation of the medical profession are so crucial. However, we may also wish to assert our own rights, especially in the context of decision-making. In the 2015 Supreme Court decision of Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board , 1 Lord Kerr and Lord Reed highlighted the effects of human rights discourse on the doctor–patient relationship: [P]atients are now widely regarded as persons holding rights, rather than as the passive recipients of the care of the medical
15 5 The doctors’ view: medical puzzle, politics and search for cures From the beginning, this disease puzzled and frightened the public and medical experts alike. Public fears were imbued with a nervous tension informed by the background knowledge of the horrors of the First World War, of which this strange and overwhelming disease was an almost inevitable and often forecast sequel. For those working in the medical sphere, this disease challenged their expertise and tested their own confidence in advancements in medicine and their recently acquired and
1990s, while the Institute of Family and Community Health established to train health workers for the health centres under Sidney Kark’s direction was equally noteworthy. Moreover, with the dispersal of South Africa’s most progressive doctors in the 1950s their ideas spread to many parts of the world. The conception of social medicine was of course neither new nor unique to
This essay positions the drug-using doctor at the intersection between traditional Gothic horror and a new fin-de-siècle medical realism, embedding the cultural anxieties at the fin de siècle in relation to the ethical and theological boundaries of scientific knowledge. The objective is to provide a framework for reading and interpreting the medico-gothic narrative of addiction. The essay examines the writings of three pioneering physician-scientists: one historical – Sigmund Freud – and two fictional – Dr Jekyll, in Robert Louis Stevenson‘s Strange Case of DrJekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Dr Seward in Bram Stoker‘s Dracula (1897).
6 Despairing doctors: professional stress and suicide Mortality among the members of the nineteenth-century medical profession was high in relation to other professions and to non-professional occupations.1 The level of risk was greatest for young men, and the career-young (up to age forty-five), when mortality among practitioners was significantly higher than for men of the same age in the general population.2 Suicide made a small contribution to this picture, since it accounted for 1.4 percent of all practitioner deaths 1873–82, but it was a more prominent
In ‘Periodising Doctor Who ’, Paul Booth cautions against treating the show’s division into eras as ‘the lens through which all Doctor Who is interpreted’, since this ‘reductively facilitates … reading[s] … based on … [a] totalising principle’ ( 2014 : 205). The danger of splitting Who into eras is that this forces fan debate into limited parameters. But under certain circumstances we might be less suspicious of Doctor Who ‘eras’. For example, the emergence of COVID-19 occasioned such a