Colourful Mayoral Campaign

London's Mayoral campaign is in full swing. Boris and Ken are the two leading contenders, slugging it out with all the usual rhetoric. Among the lesser known candidates is Dave Dobbs from the birthdayparty. A bit whacky and off the wall, he is offering us ideas that are "channelled" to him. A skill he apparently inherited from his parents and honed in the Himalayas.
Dave says "it is time to wake up. London needs Spiritual Leadership now"

Political Egos

Scotland is planning on holding a referendum in 2014 on the issue of independence from the United Kingdom. Battle lines are being drawn. Not much changes really. Back in the 17th century when Elizabeth I nephew James came to throne as King James I of England, he was already King James VI of Scotland, and with this kingly experience behind him, he wasted no time in trying to throw his weight around in the English parliament, as he had done in the Scottish parliament.

His belief and obsession with the "divine right of Kings" convinced him that he could do what he wanted and tell parliament what they were to do as well. While the Scots had pretty much let him away with this, it did not go down well in England. His constant demands for more tax money and his autocratic style created a none too friendly relationship between court and parliament. Fed up with politicians not bending to his will James dissolved parliament on 8 February 1622.

So now 390 years later to the day, you do wonder if the current Queen hasn't thought about doing a similar thing many times in her already long reign ... oh that she had the power!!!

Student Process

Thousands of students marched through London yesterday is a relatively peaceful protest against cuts in education and increases in student fees. The protest march was flanked on all sides by 4,000 police directing the route of the students.

Hundreds of Thousands Protest

Figures range from quarter of a million to half a million, however there was no doubt it was one of London's biggest demonstrations. Protesters ranged from the very young to the very old all with a clear message, some humorous, but all expressing opposition to the government's proposed cuts.

Ten to Eleven

Was this the same mouse that was seen scurrying between number 10 and 11 Downing St?

Overseeing the Painter

Painting for the tourists under the watchful eye of George Canning.
Canning held several political posts, including that of Foreign Secretary, Treasurer of the Navy and a mere four months after becoming Prime Minister died. (1827).
He played an important role in the war against France. He promised to send more troops to Lord Wellington, however the secretary of war Lord Castlereagh overturned his decision to send the troops to Portugal, sending them to Holland instead.
A bitter argument ensued resulting in Canning being shot in the thigh by Castlereagh.

Contemplation and Negotiation

As the UK's politicians contemplate and negotiate their way forward to govern they would do well to consider Ghandhi's seven sins:

• Wealth without work
• Pleasure without conscience
• Knowledge without character
• Commerce without morality
• Science without humility
• Worship without sacrifice
• Politics without principle

Schnaps: public messages about alcohol

This graph (left: Wellcome Library no. 689465i) is one of the latest works to enter the Wellcome Library catalogue. Unexciting to look at, perhaps, despite its outlandish subject. It combines two graphs in one: the top half shows new admissions of alcoholics at twenty-three Swiss cantonal lunatic asylums between 1908 and 1928, and the bottom half shows fluctuations in the price of fruit brandy in Switzerland over the same period. So during the First World War, the price of fruit brandy rose like the Matterhorn and the percentage of alcoholics among those entering cantonal lunatic asylums collapsed. Fruit brandy (non-grape brandy, Schnaps or Schnapps) is presumably mentioned owing to the use of much of the fruit grown in Switzerland for that purpose. As shown in the two examples below, the support of fruit-growers always seems to be prominent in earlier Swiss anti-alcohol campaigns, long before drunken driving became the theme of choice.

Right, Wellcome Library no. 689357i : colour lithograph after H.B. Wieland, urging a "Yes" vote in the referendum of 6 April 1930 on alcohol reform.

Left, Wellcome Library no. 689394i: colour lithograph after M. Goetz for the Swiss league of women abstainers, ca. 1905.

The graph (to return to that) looked strangely familiar. The reason was, that the British media in January 2010 were awash with discussion of a report on the same subject issued by the House of Commons Health Committee, bluntly entitled Alcohol. Appropriately, the report was released just before Christmas 2009.

The House of Commons Committee took evidence from four historians who have published on different aspects of the history of drinking and intoxication: Dr James Kneale (UCL), Dr Angela McShane (Royal College of Art/V&A Museum), Dr James Nicholls (Bath Spa University) and Dr Phil Withington (University of Cambridge). Their presence shows the strength of the tradition of cultural and social history in the UK. Their work informs chapter 2 of the report, which deals with the history of alcohol in the UK from 1550, and puts the recent increases in consumption into context by emphasizing "the huge decline in consumption from the late 19th century to the mid-twentieth, and its subsequent rise". One of the historians who gave evidence to the Committee also pointed out that there was a long history of British select committees examining the problems associated with alcohol.

A point much taken up by the media has been the association between consumption of alcohol and price: the Committee recommended both the introduction of a minimum price for alcohol and an increase in the rates of duty. The effect of low pricing was stressed by the President of the Royal College of Physicians (Professor Ian Gilmore, a high-profile opponent of excessive drinking). Several graphs in the report make similar points to those in the Swiss poster, though without trying to match price against side-effect in the same graph. This one shows the decline in the relative price of alcohol:

The effect on liver disease was mentioned over 60 times in the report and illustrated in this alarming graph:

In the 1929 Swiss poster, and others in the same series in the Wellcome Library, liver disease is not mentioned, and one might doubt whether a statistic for it would have been obtainable at that time. In the 2009 UK report, admissions to psychiatric services are not prominent. In the interval, clinical pathology services and statistics have increased while psychiatric hospitals have closed and the inpatient in general has become a relative rarity (unless the aged are accounted as such). Alcohol stays the same but the culture changes around it. Hence the relevance of historians who are not mere chroniclers of a single subject but are able to weave rich social and intellectual contexts around, and into the fabric of, a subject.

Also striking is the willingness of the Swiss publishers in 1929 to put a graph on a poster. Most designers today would be horrified, which may say more about designers than about the relative efficiency of graphs as against other forms of exposition.

Wellcome Library no. 659413i

Another poster from the same period (above) provides a better topical comparison, in that it conforms more with the taste of today's advertising industry. It shows a Swiss farmer bringing home a herd of 25,000 cattle, which meander through a vast Alpine valley. The value of the herd is the same as the annual cost of alcoholism to the Swiss Confederation. The composition (attributed to the Bernese artist Viktor Surbek) is certainly vivid, and the message could well be effective in a country where people have both a sense of responsibility to their local Commune and a feeling for how much a cow costs. But probably neither of those two criteria applies to the student binge-drinkers attending the "Carnage UK" events described in the House of Commons Committee report.

For further comment see the blog of the BBC's Home Editor Mark Easton, and the reactions to the report published there. For entertainment of a rather cruel kind, the grilling of the drinks industry's PR people by members of the committee is hard to beat: the MPs reprint it verbatim in their report.

Norman Levitt: science warrior

Norman Levitt, Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University died on 24th October 2009. He was probably best known for championing the role of science in society. With fellow scientist Paul Gross, he wrote Higher Superstition, in which he challenged the post-modern activities of humanities and social science academics who practised literary criticism of scientific texts and deconstructed scientific theories with little understanding of the science in question.

The book was cited as a major influence by Alan Sokal, physics professor at New York University, who perpetrated the notorious Sokal Hoax. In 1996, Sokal submitted a paper to the cultural studies journal Social Text, as an experiment to see if it would be published. The paper, entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", was published in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text, which at that time had no peer review process. The paper argued that quantum gravity was a social and linguistic construct. On the day of publication Sokal announced the paper to be a hoax, "structured around the silliest quotations [he] could find about mathematics and physics". Sokal revisited the affair in his own book, Beyond the Hoax.

Higher Superstition and the Sokal Hoax precipitated the so called Science Wars, a series of intellectual debates in the 1990s about the nature of science. Some of those practicing science and technology studies and cultural studies questioned the objectivity of science, employing a variety of post-modern critiques on scientific knowledge and methods. While, some in the scientific community argued that there was such a thing as objective scientific knowledge and criticized the lack of scientific understanding in these critiques.

You can discover more about both sides of the science wars debates in many books to be found at classmarks HJ (the nature of science) and HK (science in society) in the Science and Society Collection in the Wellcome Library.

Levitt went on to write Prometheus Bedeviled: science and the contradictions of contemporary culture, in which he discussed the role of science in politics and policy, a topic that continues to be relevant today.

Image above: Rowena Dugdale, Science Good or Bad?

Author: Lalita Kaplish