When I left Oxford for the urban heap of London, I found myself retracing the footsteps of Romantic poet and Guy’s medical alumnus John Keats.

On Sunday 1 October 1815, Keats enrolled as student №189 at the Counting House of Guy’s Hospital. The next nine months at Guys would alter his life. Keats planned to study there for a year and then apply for membership in the Royal College of Surgeons. Contrary to later rumours, Keats did well enough to earn a ‘dressership’ at Guy’s for the new year. Only 12 dressers were chosen from 700 students. Keats took lodgings…

by Youssef El-Gingihy @ElGingihy

The great German physician Rudolf Virchow once said that, “Medicine is a social science and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale”. The framing of the COVID-19 pandemic, in the context of different ideological approaches, confirms what Virchow meant — medicine is never just clinical, it is political too.

Mass epidemics have historical precedent for huge ramifications. The Black Death of 1348–9 wiped out at least a quarter of England’s population and handed greater bargaining power to serfs enabling them to demand higher wages. …

by Youssef El-Gingihy @ElGingihy

The great German physician Rudolf Virchow once said that, “Medicine is a social science and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale”. The framing of the coronavirus pandemic, in the context of different ideological approaches, confirms what Virchow meant — medicine is never just clinical, it is political too.

As a GP working in Tower Hamlets, it is important not to catastrophise. Panic has already been induced as evident from stockpiling with subsequent empty shelves in supermarkets. …

Friday 22nd November was the 56th anniversary of the JFK assassination falling on the exact same weekday. The case remains unsolved as the alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was dispatched before a trial could take place. The official version rests upon some astonishingly flimsy presumptions.

Yet the mainstream continues to perpetuate the notion that JFK was assassinated by lone gunman Oswald. As early as the first weekend of the assassination, the American public wasn’t buying it and very little has changed. Ever since the publication of the Warren Commission report, the sceptics have been pointing out its inconsistencies and deficiencies.

…

by Youssef El-Gingihy @ElGingihy

On his State visit to the UK, President Trump has let the cat out of the bag by declaring that the NHS would be on the table as part of a post Brexit US/UK trade deal. These remarks have caused no small amount of dismay and consternation as well as leading to an enormous backlash from the public. As Nigel Lawson once pointed out, the NHS is the closest thing that the British have to a religion and the principles of universal, comprehensive healthcare free at the point of need are overwhelmingly popular.

Unsurprisingly, Conservative ministers…

Could The Miracle On Merseyside As Liverpool Defeat Barcelona 4–0 Presage Their First League Title In Nearly 30 Years?

The morning after the night before. It feels as if the Liverpool-Barcelona fixture is somehow tonight as we touch down from rapturous, jubilant reveries; a too good to be true result that must have surely been mere semblance of reality and a figment of imagination.

Just when you think that you have seen it all! This one almost pipped them all as the greatest Liverpool match of this century. I say almost because the 2005 Champions league victory in Istanbul still…

The story of Julian Assange and Wikileaks has unfolded like a Hollywood thriller complete with classified secrets, surveillance, court cases and chases alongside a who’s who of presidents, contenders, provocateurs, controversialists and spies.

The images of a bearded, bewildered Julian Assange, looking haunted as he was frogmarched out of the Ecuadorean embassy, have been beamed across the world. He was seemingly in poor health and looked every bit the political martyr persecuted by the ‘deep state’. On closer inspection, it turned out that he was fittingly carrying a copy of the late Gore Vidal’s History of The National Security State. Admittedly, Vidal was a former insider pouring scorn on the US empire from the perch of his self-imposed exile on the Amalfi coast in Italy. …

“It is therefore worth considering aiming over a period to end the state provision of healthcare for the bulk of the population, so that medical facilities would be privately owned and run, and those seeking healthcare would be required to pay for it.”

Central Policy Review Staff document, 1982

In light of the news that Conservative backbench MP and arch Brexiteer John Redwood will become a knight of the realm with the announcement of the New Year’s Honours list, it is worth reviewing his contribution to the NHS privatisation juggernaut.

A frequent refrain is that the concept of NHS privatisation…