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Yes, i think it is in his book. I'll see if I can find it. To try to be entirely fair to SW he was intending to use this as an example of how badly treated ME patients were by the other branches of the profession. Possibly, neurologists in particular. He, on the other hand, liked to see them and...

Sorry; I keep commenting on this. Feel free to tell me to shut up. Seeing all this has brought home to me the possible fallacy of part of the supposed case for hysteria. It was that only the staff were affected, not the patients. We have seen from McE's thesis that this is partly false, and...

I was just trying to make the point, for those who may be less familiar with the background information, that Fauci's professed view that post-covid is highly suggestive of ME should not be taken as offering comfort, unless it can be shown that his views on ME have changed.

There is something very puzzling about those early tweets. It is an amazing piece of detective work to have uncovered the original sources. The case of Phoebe Cover seems a mystery. We are told on 25 July that she was the first case - an American heiress come to London to work at th RFH. We are...

Just in case there are people who do not understand the antipathy towards the BMJ, and the suggestions of bias, I thought I would drop in this little reminder from 1989. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1836497/pdf/bmj00231-0039.pdf For Debate Myalgic encephalomyelitis, Princess...

Reassessment of some outbreaks of epidemic neuromyasthenia indicated a very high prevalence of neurosis in affected individuals. In one of the most famous such epidemics, occurring among staff of the Royal Free Hospital in London, England in 1955, the progression of the outbreak was argued...

You can't just believe the patients ,you know. They have dysfunctional cognitions...not to mention maladaptive behaviour.

We all, I am sure, recall SW's joke about receiving a note from a neurologist saying "Will you see this girl, Simon? There's nothing wrong with her." Or words to that effect. How we laughed.

I wonder whether they took legal advice over the likely efficacy of that exclusion clause, and, if they did, why they deemed it necessary to do so.

I am sure they are world leading in some respects.

"The Wellness Approach". I love the way they think we have never heard of George Orwell. Or, perhaps they haven't.

...unless it isn't.

There is on the twitter feed on 27 July a fascinating copy of a report in the LA Times dated 12 feb 1970 on the M and B paper. It appears to be syndicated from the Washington Post. The author Alfred Friendly appears to have been managing editor of the WP at the time. I hope it will be copied...

The one thing of which stupid people are convinced is that what they consider to be generally true is true in every particular case.

What will be interesting to see is whether the contemporaneous reporting gives any indication of particular anxiety sufficient to cause a hysterical response. One of the problems I have with the hysterical explanation is that its proponents seem unable to agree amongst themselves which are the...

The concept "wilfully" has been known to cause all sorts of conundrums.

Perhaps failure to test was a strategic decision.

Jenkins quotes Gosling P (1970Epidemic Malaise BMJ 1, 499-500) as saying Secondly, in 1955, a very high proportion of the staff and student population and all the nurses at the Royal Free Hospital were females. Most of the male students were at that time preclinical and were away, as it was the...

There is a somewhat surprising element to both the thesis and the 1973 paper. It is usually stated that no patients were diagnosed with the condition. It seems this is false. Both in-patients and out-patients were diagnosed, though admittedly in relatively small numbers. I have previously...

Interesting to see in the thesis the suggestion that one person remained ill for a year. This was claimed in the 1970 papers but it is clear from the 1973 follow up that they were aware by at least 1969 that at least 7 of the 100 (or fewer given the failures to respond) remained ill. A...