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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 19972

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Appleton DR
Cross Words
BMJ 1994 Dec 24; 309:1737
http://www.bmj.com/content/309/6970/1737


Abstract:

Seal up the mouth of outrage for a while, Till we can clear these ambiguities—Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

As a fairly compulsive crossword solver, I derive a great deal of enjoyment from the wonderful double meanings and grammatical contortions in the English language. A clue in a crossword which I saw the other day hinged on the metal cap protecting a sewer being not a manhole cover but a thimble. Another merely said “Beach wear. (7,7)” and the answer, instead of being BATHING COSTUME, was COASTAL EROSION. For some reason it pleases me that you can have a catch in your voice while giving voice to a catch, and a good catch in the nets might mean quite different things to anglers and cricketers. Prepositions can be used in so many different ways that you can, for instance, treat patients with piles or with pills. All these features of the language add to the richness not only of informal conversation but of literature—think of Dylan Thomas’s “sloe-black, slow, black, crow-black … sea.”

Ximenes (not the one from the Spanish Inquisition, but the one who composed crosswords) said that a good clue only had to say what it meant —it did not need to mean what it said. But when people wish to impart information they have to avoid ambiguities, even if one interpretation is more likely than another. A radio announcer who talks of silent film music might be given the benefit of the …

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909