Truth, purification and power

Speaking truth to power?

anyone who has read Hilary Mantel’s magnificent Booker prize-winning novel Wolf Hall will be in no doubt about the fate of government advisers who give their masters the wrong advice. During the reign of England’s tudor king, Henry Viii, refusal to recant your views resulted not only in a swift fall from grace and power, but also a short trip from Westminster to the tower of London. if you were...

Revealing Power in Truth; Comment on “Knowledge, Moral Claims and the Exercise of Power in Global Health”

Jeremy Shiffman’s editorial appropriately calls on making all forms of power more apparent and accountable, notably productive power derived from expertise and claims to moral authority. This commentary argues that relationships based on productive power can be especially difficult to reveal in global health policy because of embedded notions about the nature of power and politics. Yet, it is e...

Speaking Power to Truth: Digital Discourse and the Public Intellectual

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth

This discussion aims to provide the occasional medical expert witness with background knowledge of the adversarial court system and the role of the medical expert witness within it. The parallel evolution of the adversarial and inquisitorial legal systems has been more out of tradition rather than any systematic review of the effectiveness of one system or the other. Both legal systems have the...

Truth, double truth and statistics.

After every influenza pandemic (including the Russian of the 1890s and the Spanish influenza of 1918–1919), learned commentaries have reflected on the clinical presentation of the disease, noting that the great majority of cases were very mild, so mild that they corresponded much more to the symptoms of an upper respiratory tract infection than to an influenza-like illness with fever and prostr...