Paradoxes, fresh starts, and the fortnightly BMJ
A new year is meant to bring new hope, and perhaps this one does too, but it’s hard to be thrilled by health services overwhelmed by winter pressures (doi:10.1136/bmj.q2871),1 transatlantic rabble rousing, and insoluble global crises and conflicts. What a new year can certainly bring is a fresh start, with new energy and effort to direct ourselves away from a destructive future, to focus on improving people’s health and wellbeing. Yet with each era the task grows more complex. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner , sailors marooned on a ship drifting near the equator are tortured by “water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink.” Medicine at that time, the end of the 18th century, was …
