In one of the later editions of General Psychopathlogy, Karl Jaspers writes that, when the book was first published, his discussion of the distinction between explaining and understanding was " greeted as something radically new, although all I had done was to link psychiatric reality with the traditional humanities " (GP, p. 302). There is not a little tension between the apparent modesty of t...

Few things give me greater pleasure than reading good prose. I've been reading an unbroken series of what I snobbishly call "good books" – Dickens, Trollope, Hemingway, Powell, Austen, Eliot, Conrad, James, Proust, Balzac, Roth, Updike, McEwan, and the like – since I was a teenager. Beside my bed I have a copy of Harold Bloom's The best poems of the English language: from Chaucer to Frost. Bloo...

Jean Hamburger (1909-1992) is considered the founder of the concept of medical intensive care (réanimation médicale) and the first to propose the name Nephrology for the branch of medicine dealing with kidney diseases. One of the first kidney grafts in the world (with short-term success), in 1953, and the first dialysis session in France, in 1955, were performed under his guidance. His achievem...