As I approached retirement, my daughter Rebecca suggested I give thought to tweeting and blogging. I did, and they seemed infinitely better options than growing and entering shapely vegetables in the village show. My first blog, actually a year in advance of my leaving UCL, was on 30th October 2012. It was on what was… Read More »
Max Weber was long called the ‘sociologist’s sociologist’, principally in acknowledgement not only of the wide-ranging reach of his scholarship and his general analyses of societal development and change, as well as of particular substantive issues, but of his work on the philosophy and methods of research. I once gave a talk in Munich directly… Read More »
If Marx would have baulked at the idea that he was a sociological theorist, his inclusion in my series cannot be gainsaid: he has been a catalyst for so much thinking about the nature of modern society. There are of course hundreds of summaries of his work, so what more might a single blog accomplish?… Read More »
2006 was a turning point for me. When I came to what was then the Middlesex Hospital Medical School in 1978, it was John Hinton’s Department of Psychiatry I entered. After Rachel Rosser’s premature and sad death, Stan Newman climbed a short greasy UCL pole and took over. For one reason or another, he subsequently… Read More »
A quartet of Emory University acedamics and friends were the pulse of what I have previously celebrated as Emory University’s summer programme on ‘comparative health care’. I was their London coordinator for 35 years, climbing my way from postgraduate to professorial facilitator. Dick Levinson kicked it all off and remains a close friend, as does… Read More »
Medical schools are strange institutions, replete with personnel and, more to the point, managers whose grasp of non-laboratory routes to knowledge and understanding is often restricted. I cited Professor Semple at the Middlesex HMS in a previous blog. He asked a sub-committee attended by Ted Honderich as well as myself: ‘this ethics, is it respectable… Read More »
I suppose Ron’s death was not a surprise. He was 92 and more than ready to depart. But the expected can still, and perhaps normally does, strike as if unexpected for those left behind. He had lived with us for over two years, surviving our move from Epsom to Mickleham in 2004, albeit with the… Read More »
Second Open Letter to Iain McNicol 10 November 2016 Dear Iain McNicol, I was if you recall suspended from the Labour Party, in the process having my vote for Jeremy Corbyn as leader cancelled. This suspension was lifted recently but I was left with an indefinite warning on my ‘file’ with regard to my future… Read More »
After 13 years in Epsom’s South Street, in 2004 we moved. There were two principal reasons for this. First, we were more than short of space: my father, 90-year old Ron, was esconced in what used to be our sitting room (we used to call it a lounge back in Colebook Close), leaving us a… Read More »
This is a revised version of an item written for Bill Cockerham’s Encyclopaedia of Medical Sociology a while back. Stigma, I noted somewhat uncontroversially, denotes the presence of an attribute that discredits its possessor. Since it is evident such attributes have varied by time and place, it is apparent that stigma and stigmatization necessarily involve… Read More »