Hugh Pennington

Syphilis and the League of Nations have more in common than you might think. Both were dumped into the dustbin of history in the 1940s: syphilis by penicillin, the League of Nations by the Second World War. But the connection goes further than chronological coincidence. Before the war, the League took a deep and direct interest in syphilis, with its Health Organisation arranging conferences...

For something to return, it has first to go away. In Asia, Africa and Latin America, TB never did go away; in richer countries it was only driven down to lurk in the places inhabited by society’s rejects. It didn’t disappear completely from among society’s paid-up members: its germs sleep in me today. I have a Ghon focus in my left lung, a collection of cells, some from my...

“Retractions of scientific papers are not uncommon. They usually happen because a research team has been unable to replicate or substantiate its findings. But the formal retraction of an interpretation is almost without precedent. Horton’s leader [in the Lancet] on ‘The Lessons of MMR’ doesn’t discuss the scientific strength of the link made in the Wakefield paper between autism and MMR. It implies that with hindsight he would not have published it – but the reason would have been Wakefield’s apparent conflict of interest, not doubts about its truth.”

Joanna Blythman does not like supermarkets. The bigger they are, the greater her hatred. She says they are responsible for the slow death of community life. They take the skill out of shopping. They subvert home cooking. They have done away with seasonal variety. Their buyers are bullied by their superiors to bully their suppliers. Supermarkets have an obsession with hygiene at the expense of...

Well over three hundred years have gone by since the plague died out as an indigenous disease in Britain. It lingers on only as a rare rural infection in Madagascar, Tanzania, Kenya, Zaire, Botswana, Uganda, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, the US, Vietnam, China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Burma. Worldwide, the annual number of human cases rarely exceeds a couple of thousand. As the Oxford Textbook of...