Richard Smith's non-medical blogs

I read the passage below that describes wild Highlanders in Glasgow at the start of the 18th century in Walter Scott’s novel Rob Roy and immediately thought of Queretaro in Mexico, where our son and his family live.

I came across this account of Ivan Illich’s idea on a different kind of politics in “Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey” by David Cayley.

Mentions of the menopause in British daily papers increased seven-fold between 2001 and 2021 and have, I’m sure, increased still further since.

“The Greatest Benefit to Mankind – A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present” by Roy Porter was published in 1999.

Mahler write his Ninth Symphony, which he never heard performed, in1909-10.

I’d never heard of Rachel Cusk until I read a review of her latest book.

The actor and director Phelim McDermott certainly knows how to tell a story and put on a show, but did the magnificent Tao of Glass have a message or an argument?

I took this list of things to doubt from Erich Fromm’s introduction to Ivan Illich’s book “Celebration of Awareness.”

I should have been at the Proms last night as well as tonight.

Granddaughter: When will you go to the shop for a roll?

I wrote the first two paragraphs of this blog two weeks ago when the British Prime minister was coming under great pressure to block the early release of two prisoners.

I don’t often shed tears when I read, but I shed tears twice at the end of Walter Scott’s novel “Waverley”—once in the scene below and once in the scene that follows when the Englishman Edward Waverley says farewell to Fergus Mac-Ivor before he is taken a…

When a student in Edinburgh I regularly walked past by the huge Scott Monument, a memorial to the novelist Walter Scott, and wondered why there was such a huge memorial to a writer that I’d never read and didn’t seem to be read by anybody.

I took this from Roy Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity, a marvellous book.

“The Greatest Benefit to Mankind – A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present” by Roy Porter was published in 1999.

John Keats wrote this to J H Reynolds, a friend and poet, on 19 February 1818 “I have an idea that a man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner—let him on any certain day read a Page of full Poesy or distilled Prose and let him wander with it, and…