Britain – Page 9 – artdiamondblog.com

The Bureaucratic Absurdities of Socialized Medicine

(p. 13) Reading “Do No Harm,” Henry Marsh’s frank and absorbing narrative of his life in neurosurgery, it was easy to imagine him at the table. The men, and increasingly women, who slice back the scalp, open the skull and enter the brain to extract tumors, clip aneurysms and liberate nerves, share a certain ego required for such work. They typically are bold and blunt, viewing themselves as emperors of the clinical world. Marsh adds irony to this characterization, made clear in the opening line of the book, “I often have to cut into the brain and it is something I hate doing.”
. . .
Britain’s National Health Service is a socialized system, and Marsh chafes at new rigid rules imposed by its administrators. He is particularly incensed by a mandatory dress code: Neurosurgeons are subject to disciplinary action for wearing a wristwatch. There is scant evidence that this item contributes to hospital infections, but he is shadowed on ward rounds by a bureaucrat who takes notes on his dress and behavior. The reign of the emperor is ending, but Marsh refuses to comply and serve as a myrmidon.
Clinical practice is becoming a theater of the absurd for patients as well. Hospital charts are filled with N.H.S. forms detailing irrelevant aspects of care. Searching for a patient’s operative note, Marsh finds documentation she passed a “Type 4 turd.” He shows her an elaborate stool chart “colored a somber and appropriate brown, each sheet with a graphically illustrated guide to the seven different types of turd. . . . She looked at the document with disbelief and burst out laughing.”

For the full review, see:
JEROME GROOPMAN. “Consider the Comma.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., MAY 24, 2015): 13.
(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs, added; ellipsis within paragraph, in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date MAY 21, 2015, and has the title “‘Do No Harm,’ by Henry Marsh.”)

(p. C6) Amid the life-or-death dramas of neurosurgery in this book are some blackly comic scenes recounting the absurdities of hospital bureaucracy in the National Health Service: not just chronic bed shortages (which mean long waits and frantic juggling of surgery schedules), but also what Dr. Marsh calls a “loss of regimental spirit” and ridiculous meetings, like a slide presentation from “a young man with a background in catering telling me I should develop empathy, keep focused and stay calm.”

For the full review, see:
MICHIKO KAKUTANI. “From a Surgeon, Exhilarations and Regrets.” The New York Times (Tues., MAY 19, 2015): C1 & C6.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date MAY 18, 2015, and has the title “Books of The Times; Review: In ‘Do No Harm,’ a Brain Surgeon Tells All.”)

The book under review, in both reviews, is:
Marsh, Henry. Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2015.

Few Founding Fathers Toiled Harder Against Slavery than Hamilton

(p. 211) The magnitude of southern slavery was to have far-reaching repercussions in Hamilton’s career. The most damning and hypocritical critiques of his allegedly aristocratic economic system emanated from the most aristocratic southern slaveholders, who deflected attention from their own nefarious deeds by posing as populist champions and assailing the northern financial and mercantile interests aligned with Hamilton. As will be seen, the national consensus that the slavery issue should be tabled to preserve the union meant that the southern plantation economy was effectively ruled off-limits to political discussion, while Hamilton’s system, by default, underwent the most searching scrutiny.
Few, if any, other founding fathers opposed slavery more consistently or toiled (p. 212) harder to eradicate it than Hamilton–a fact that belies the historical stereotype that he cared only for the rich and privileged.
. . .
(p. 213) The issue surged to the fore with the peace treaty that ended the Revolution. At the prompting of Henry Laurens, article 7 placed a ban on the British “carrying away any Negroes or other property” after the war. This nebulous phrase was construed by slaveholders to mean that the British should return runaway slaves who had defected to the British lines or else pay compensation. The British, in turn, claimed that the former slaves had been freed when they crossed behind British lines. Conceding that Britain may have violated article 7 on technical grounds, Hamilton nevertheless refused to stand up for the slaveholders and invoked a higher moral authority:

In the interpretation of treaties, things odious or immoral are not to be presumed. The abandonment of negroes, who had been induced to quit their masters on the faith of official proclamations, promising them liberty, to fall again under the yoke of their masters and into slavery is as odious and immoral a thing as can be conceived. It is odious not only as it imposes an act of perfidy on one of the contracting parties, but as it tends to bring back to servitude men once made free.

This fierce defender of private property–this man for whom contracts were to be sacred covenants–expressly denied the sanctity of any agreement that stripped people of their freedom.

Source:
Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.
(Note: italics in original.)

Cornwalis Betrayed the Slaves Who Had Helped Him

(p.161) Dug in on high ground, Cornwallis had been throwing up earthwork redoubts since early August, employing thousands of slaves who had defected to the British lines in expectation of earning their freedom.
. . .
(p. 164) Cornwallis had grown so desperate that he infected blacks with smallpox and forced them to wander toward enemy lines in an attempt to sicken the opposing forces.

Source:
Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.

The Washing Machine Is a Great Bulwark of Women’s Liberation

(p. C9) If the past is foreign country because they do things differently there, we’re lucky to have such a knowledgeable cicerone as Ruth Goodman.
. . .
“I like to put time and effort into studying the objects and tools that people made and used, and I like to try methods and approaches out for myself,” she writes in “How to Be a Victorian.” This sounds straightforward enough but hardly hints at the leaps of imaginative empathy the author is so good at: When she visits a museum to examine a Victorian farm worker’s wool coat, for example, she sees both the husband “who sweated and left stains on his clothes, who physically felt the cold” and the wife who “spent hours carefully and neatly sewing up the tear.”
Ms. Goodman observes that the wife’s technique for repair matches one taught in working-class textbooks, a fact that raises questions in her mind. “How widespread was such needlework education, and was it likely to have been women who carried out such repairs?” she wonders. “If it takes me over an hour to do the work, would my Victorian forebears have been quicker? When would they have fitted such a chore into their day?” That little rip in the man’s coat, it turns out, is like a tiny window into “the great sweeps of political and economic life” that in turn “bring us back to the personal.” Trade disruptions in textiles during the American Civil War, for instance, “pushed up the price of the labourer’s coat, making that repair more necessary.”
. . .
Many, many things about daily life are far better now: “My own historical laundry experiences have led me to see the powered washing machine as one of the great bulwarks of women’s liberation, an invention that can sit alongside contraception and the vote.”

For the full review, see:
ALEXANDRA KIMBALL. “Living Like a Queen; You might get used to using soot to brush your teeth. But steel corsets? Never.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Oct. 4, 2014): C9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Oct. 3, 2014, and has the title “Book Review: ‘How to Be a Victorian” by Ruth Goodman; You might get used to using soot to brush your teeth. But steel corsets? Never.”)

The book under review is:
Goodman, Ruth. How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2014.

British Parents Jailed by Nationalized Health Service for Trying to Sell Home to Pay for Son’s Cancer Treatment

(p. A4) . . . , no Briton is ever entirely happy with the taxpayer-funded service, and now the case of a 5-year-old boy with a brain tumor has thrown a harsh light on the $170 billion-a-year system.
Critics are asking whether the service was justified in refusing a cancer treatment for the boy, Ashya King, sought by his desperate parents in an effort to save his life, and whether it overstepped in trying to impose its decision on his family.
The refusal set off a chain of events that enthralled and horrified the British public, as Ashya’s parents removed their son from University Hospital Southampton in England on Aug. 28 without the consent of British doctors, setting off a highly publicized international hunt. Concern for the child, however, turned into public outrage when the parents, Brett and Naghemeh King, were arrested and jailed in Madrid, where they had traveled to sell their holiday home so they could pay for the treatment, called proton beam therapy.
. . .
“They treated us like terrorists,” Mr. King, 51, said during an emotional news conference in Spain, where he and his wife were held for three days, separated from their critically ill son, as British authorities pursued University Hospital Southampton’s recommendation that Ashya be made a ward of the court.
. . .
(p. A10) Professor Hunter . . . said that, because the health service is publicly accountable, doctors tend to be reluctant to recommend innovative solutions for fear of lawsuits if things go wrong.
Mrs. Anderton, too, said that, despite the excellent care her son received, the N.H.S. is not always at the cutting edge. “The only downside is that we don’t have advanced types of treatments that could be lifesaving,” she said.

For the full story, see:
KIMIKO DE FREYTAS-TAMURA. “Health Care for Britain in Harsh Light.” The New York Times (Weds., SEPT. 17, 2014): A4 & A10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date SEPT. 16, 2014.)

China as Evil Empire

(p. C1) Mr. Eimer is a British correspondent who sometimes roamed around minority areas using a second passport with (p. C6) a tourist visa to avoid official restrictions that apply to journalists. What he found on his travels was a pattern of misrule and oppression on the part of the Han, as ethnic Chinese call themselves, and a mixture of resentment, despair, resignation and anomie among the subjugated peoples.
. . .
Because Mr. Eimer is not bound by diplomatic or journalistic niceties, he can be blunt in the terminology he uses. To him, China is not so much a state or a nation as a “huge, unwieldy and unstable empire,” with the Han in the dominant position that the Austrians, Turks or English once enjoyed in empires now vanished.
. . .
“We say China is a country vast in territory, rich in resources and large in population,” Mao Zedong said in a 1956 speech buried deep in the fifth volume of his selected works but cited by Mr. Eimer as a likely explanation for Chinese expansionism. “As a matter of fact, it is the Han nationality whose population is large and the minority nationalities whose territory is vast and whose resources are rich.”
As the Mao speech shows, Mr. Eimer is especially adept at ferreting out obscure historical facts and documents that put the lie to Beijing’s claims that these outlying areas have always been part of China. To deal with neighbors who were then outside its borders, the Qing dynasty, he notes, “established a separate bureaucracy called the Lifan Yuan, or Court of Colonial Affairs,” which “functioned much like the former Colonial Office in the U.K., which administered the British Empire.”
Mr. Eimer’s travels take him to all four quadrants of China’s land border, the longest in the world. His method is to spend time with an ethnic minority living in Chinese territory, then cross over to a neighboring country to see how the same group is faring there — almost always better than in China.

For the full review, see:
LARRY ROHTER. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; An Antidote to Illusion, Examining Restive Borders.” The New York Times (Mon., AUG. 4, 2014): C1 & C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date AUG. 3, 2014, and has the title “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; An Antidote to Illusion, Examining Restive Borders; ‘The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China,’ by David Eimer.”)

The book being reviewed is:
Eimer, David. The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2014.

3.2 Million Waiting for Care Under England’s Single-Payer Socialized Medicine

(p. A13) . . . even as the single-payer system remains the ideal for many on the left, it’s worth examining how Britain’s NHS, established in 1948, is faring. The answer: badly. NHS England–a government body that receives about £100 billion a year from the Department of Health to run England’s health-care system–reported this month that its hospital waiting lists soared to their highest point since 2006, with 3.2 million patients waiting for treatment after diagnosis. NHS England figures for July 2013 show that 508,555 people in London alone were waiting for operations or other treatments–the highest total for at least five years.
Even cancer patients have to wait: According to a June report by NHS England, more than 15% of patients referred by their general practitioner for “urgent” treatment after being diagnosed with suspected cancer waited more than 62 days–two full months–to begin their first definitive treatment.
. . .
The socialized-medicine model is struggling elsewhere in Europe as well. Even in Sweden, often heralded as the paradigm of a successful welfare state, months-long wait times for treatment routinely available in the U.S. have been widely documented.
To fix the problem, the Swedish government has aggressively introduced private-market forces into health care to improve access, quality and choices. Municipal governments have increased spending on private-care contracts by 50% in the past decade, according to Näringslivets Ekonomifakta, part of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, a Swedish employers’ association.

For the commentary, see:
SCOTT W. ATLAS. “OPINION; Where ObamaCare Is Going; The government single-payer model that liberals aspire to for the U.S. is increasingly in trouble around the world.” The Wall Street Journal (Thur., Aug. 14, 2014): A13.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 13, 2014.)

“Malthus Was Wrong”

(p. 20) The biggest problem with Malthusiasm, as Mayhew addresses at length, is that Malthus was wrong. He thought England was nearing the limits of its ability to provide for its growing population. But as that population continued to grow in the 19th century, the country proved more than able to feed itself by increasing agricultural productivity and importing food that it could easily pay for with its industrial wealth. And toward the end of the century, birthrates began falling and population growth slowed.
. . .
There is evidence enough in this book for a pretty withering attack on Malthusianism, if not on Malthus. Mayhew, however, prefers the role of calm and evenhanded guide. At the end he’s even hinting that today’s Malthusian prophets of environmental doom are on to something. They may be: Just because Malthus was wrong about nature’s limits in 1798 doesn’t prove we won’t ever hit those limits. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Still, you’d think it would put more of a damper on people’s Malthusiasm.

For the full review, see:
JUSTIN FOX. “Head Count.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., Aug. 3, 2014): 20.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Aug. 1, 2014. )

The book being reviewed is:
Mayhew, Robert J. Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014.

McCloskey’s “Great Fact” of “the Ice-Hockey Stick”

Source of image: http://www.bombayharbor.com/productImage/Ice_Hockey_Stick/Ice_Hockey_Stick.jpg

(p. 2) Economic history has looked like an ice-hockey stick lying on the ground. It had a long, long horizontal handle at $3 a day extending through the two-hundred-thousand-year history of Homo sapiens to 1800, with little bumps upward on the handle in ancient Rome and the early medieval Arab world and high medieval Europe, with regressions to $3 afterward–then a wholly unexpected blade, leaping up in the last two out of the two thousand centuries, to $30 a day and in many places well beyond.
. . .
(p. 48) The heart of the matter is sixteen. Real income per head nowadays exceeds that around 1700 or 1800 in, say, Britain and in other countries that have experienced modern economic growth by such a large factor as sixteen, at least. You, oh average participant in the British economy, go through at least sixteen times more food and clothing and housing and education in a day than an ancestor of yours did two or three centuries ago. Not sixteen percent more, but sixteen multiplied by the old standard of living. You in the American or the South Korean economy, compared to the wretchedness of former Smiths in 1653 or Kims in 1953, have done even better. And if such novelties as jet travel and vitamin pills and instant messaging are accounted at their proper value, the factor of material improvement climbs even higher than sixteen–to eighteen, or thirty, or far beyond. No previous episode of enrichment for the average person approaches it, not the China of the Song Dynasty or the Egypt of the New Kingdom, not the glory of Greece or the grandeur of Rome.
No competent economist, regardless of her politics, denies the Great Fact.

Source:
McCloskey, Deirdre N. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

In France “‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’ Means that What’s Yours Should Be Mine”

Guillaume Santacruz is among many French entrepreneurs now using London as their base. He said of his native France, “The economy is not going well, and if you want to get ahead or run your own business, the environment is not good.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1) Guillaume Santacruz, an aspiring French entrepreneur, brushed the rain from his black sweater and skinny jeans and headed down to a cavernous basement inside Campus London, a seven-story hive run by Google in the city’s East End.
. . .
A year earlier, Mr. Santacruz, who has two degrees in finance, was living in Paris near the Place de la Madeleine, working in a boutique finance firm. He had taken that job after his attempt to start a business in Marseille foundered under a pile of government regulations and a seemingly endless parade of taxes. The episode left him wary of starting any new projects in France. Yet he still hungered to be his own boss.
He decided that he would try again. Just not in his own country.
“A lot of people are like, ‘Why would you ever leave France?’ ” Mr. Santacruz said. “I’ll tell you. France has a lot of problems. There’s a feeling of gloom that seems to be growing deeper. The economy is not going well, and if you want to get ahead or run your own business, the environment is not good.”
. . .
(p. 5) “Making it” is almost never easy, but Mr. Santacruz found the French bureaucracy to be an unbridgeable moat around his ambitions. Having received his master’s in finance at the University of Nottingham in England, he returned to France to work with a friend’s father to open dental clinics in Marseille. “But the French administration turned it into a herculean effort,” he said.
A one-month wait for a license turned into three months, then six. They tried simplifying the corporate structure but were stymied by regulatory hurdles. Hiring was delayed, partly because of social taxes that companies pay on salaries. In France, the share of nonwage costs for employers to fund unemployment benefits, education, health care and pensions is more than 33 percent. In Britain, it is around 20 percent.
“Every week, more tax letters would come,” Mr. Santacruz recalled.
. . .
Diane Segalen, an executive recruiter for many of France’s biggest companies who recently moved most of her practice, Segalen & Associés, to London from Paris, says the competitiveness gap is easy to see just by reading the newspapers. “In Britain, you read about all the deals going on here,” Ms. Segalen said. “In the French papers, you read about taxes, more taxes, economic problems and the state’s involvement in everything.”
. . .
“It is a French cultural characteristic that goes back to almost the revolution and Robespierre, where there’s a deep-rooted feeling that you don’t show that you make money,” Ms. Segalen, the recruiter, said. “There is this sense that ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ means that what’s yours should be mine. It’s more like, if someone has something I can’t have, I’d rather deprive this person from having it than trying to work hard to get it myself. That’s a very French state of mind. But it’s a race to the bottom.”

For the full story, see:
LIZ ALDERMAN. “Au Revoir, Entrepreneurs.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., MARCH 23, 2014): 1 & 5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 22, 2014.)

‘Diane Segalen moved most of her executive recruiting practice to London from Paris. In France, she says, “there is this sense that ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ means that what’s yours should be mine.”” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Margaret Thatcher Left Britain “Prosperous, Confident and Free”

Source of book image: http://media.npr.org/assets/bakertaylor/covers/manually-added/thatchercover_custom-e43e3b7aec14140f5606737ab274110160f0c94a-s2-c85.jpg

Daniel Hannan, a European Parliament representative from Britain, discusses a favorite book of 2013:

(p. C9) We’ve waited a long time for the authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher, and it has been worth the wait. Through Charles Moore’s vivid prose, we relive the extraordinary story of Britain’s greatest peacetime leader–how she found her country bankrupt, demoralized and dishonored and left it prosperous, confident and free. Mr. Moore weaves numerous new revelations into the narrative of the single-minded, humorless, workaholic, patriotic force of nature that was Margaret Thatcher.

For the full article, see:
“12 Months of Reading; We asked 50 of our friends–from April Bloomfield to Mike Tyson–to name their favorite books of 2013.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Dec. 14, 2013): C6 & C9-C12.
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Dec. 13, 2013.)

The book that Hannan praises is:
Moore, Charles. Margaret Thatcher: From Grantham to the Falklands. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.