Twitter account will provide headlines & quotes from the 1955 Royal Free Hospital outbreak to the day when each headline appeared - 65 years later

I have been mulling over something which I noticed about the Caroline Richmond article on the 1989 Wessely et al paper, which was posted above, posted on Twitter on 11 August. It seems to be the case that there is no paper so poor that it cannot be worsened by journalists and journal editors. We saw this with the McE and B papers and the accompanying BMJ editorial, which passed hurriedly over the substance of the papers to dwell on the scurrilous. It was the Editorial that seemed to be emphasised by Freindly for the US market.

The Wessely paper was reported by Richmond in GP magazine and it is worth paying attention to the editorial contributions.

First there is the accompanying photograph, which Richmond disowned, of the jogger.

Then there is the question of editorial subheadings and their positioning.

"Tell patients it's time to pick up the pieces". These words do appear in the text, but the context is much more nuanced. The sub heading interrupts a paragraph to alter the emphasis of the paragraph and place undue emphasis on these words. That might, of course, have been done by someone who's overriding concern was symmetry and the aesthetics of the magazine. If so, he was in the wrong job.

"Gradually expose them to hard activity". I have looked for these words in the text of both the Wessely and Richmond papers, and I cannot see them. It may be my eyesight. This seems to be a figment of the editor's imagination.

One expects these tricks of the general newspapers, but not of professional journals. There must have been many GPs who saw only the headline and subheadings.

 

Richmond helped set up "Healthwatch". Dick Taverne is a patron of HW. DT is the chair of Sense About Science. SAS has links with the Living Marxism network.

I know this is a little 'guilty by association' but I feel it's maybe relevant to point this out.

 

Yes, there are all sorts of unexplained associations. The meeting setting up the forerunner of HW, Campaign against Health Fraud, was held in, I think, November 1988. Wessely seems to have been involved. It seems to be one of those organisations about which it is impossible to be certain that the stated goals, which are ones with which few would disagree, are the intended goals of all the members.

 

Richmond also wrote the BMJ obit for McEvedy.

 

I have come across something (else) rather odd about the McE thesis which is linked near the beginning of the thread.

The two McE and B papers appearing in the BMJ were published in the first edition of the year. Presumably that would have been out on 2nd January, 1970 To allow for peer review and preparation for publication it might be reasonable to suppose that the papers were presented to the journal by mid November, certainly no later than the end of November.

I cannot see a date on the thesis but at page 46 (page 60 of the PDF) McE says in relation to the follow up

In all the follow-up took a little over a year - roughly
from September 1968 to September 1969 inclusive.

If that is taken at face value, that gives an absolute maximum of three months for the analysis of the data, the drawing of conclusions from them, the writing and assessment of the thesis, and the preparation and submission of the two papers to the BMJ. What busy boys they must have been. Wasn't McE also employed as a senior registrar at the time?

This could account for why the third paper came out three years later, but in that case they must have been publishing the papers without the supporting evidence to back the conclusions. Not that evidence had much to do with the conclusions.

It seems very strange.

 

It would be very helpful if everybody would stop using initials instead of names as if everybody knows who they are referring to. Thank you.

I had extensive personal experience with the damaging efforts to hijack our early advocacy efforts in the US by some people who were primarily interested in health fraud as they defined that term. I am too sick to write about it adequately now, but it had permanently bad effects.

 

Using initials instead of names is a way of preventing bots from collecting threads as our posts are monitored and used against us. I do it deliberately but it may be a topic that needs discussed.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1304781375518773253

 

So that's another young nurse then.

One starts to see more patterns emerging. Geoff Watts apparently worked with Michael O'Donnell at World Medicine. Michael O'Donnell was an early member and officer of Campaign against Health Fraud, and I have seen it suggested, but have not yet seen confirmatory evidence, that he was at on time editor of GP Magazine-the one in which the Caroline Richmond article appeared (though I don't think he was editor at the time))

 

Margaret MacPherson? No, she was in her fifties and not a nurse.

 

((thought that would be understood as sarcasm))

 

What a string of coincidences

Geoff Watts, presenter of Radio Four's Medicine Now, is the recipient of the first annual HealthWatch Award. Here is a shortened version of the talk he gave to HealthWatch members.

https://www.healthwatch-uk.org/20-awards/award-lectures/72-1993-geoff-watts.html

 

Apologies if has been mentioned

https://twitter.com/user/status/1305154739118714881

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1313414336698888193


It is useful to be presented with this again. Permission was given to McEvedy to access the notes on the basis that "the study was designed to determine a possible predisposition to psychoneurosis in the affected group". Presumably there would have been a minuted decision to this effect and written authorisation would have been granted referring to this condition.

This is a little odd. At the time there were two debates, or their after effects, continuing. On the one hand there was the contretemps between Elliot Slater and Francis Walshe conducted in UK journals regarding the diagnosis of hysteria. There seems to have been a degree of personal animosity in this, and Walshe had questioned the role of encephalitis.

There was a second strand involving the research of Imboden Canter and Cluff funded by the US Army Chemical Corps. This was the strand that seemed to suggest pre-existing psychoneurosis was the major factor in perpetuation of symptoms. What is strange is that, following the retrospective brucellosis studies of 1959, they had thought it necessary to produce a prospective study, which they did with the Asian flu work. It is difficult to see what merit there could have been in conducting a further retrospective study, when the science, even if rather poor science, had already moved on. One of the Imboden papers was published in 1966, which would have been when McE and B were putting together their plans.

It is strange that Ramsey makes no reference to the third paper from 1973, which is the one in which some effort is made to address issues of psychoneurosis. He was surely aware of it. Were there ethical constraints to public discussion? The patients must have been, to some limited extent, identifiable. It looks as though Compston assisted with the preparation of a questionnaire for that work. So there was some continuing involvement.

It would be interesting to know the express conditions which were contained in the authorisation to use the records and whether there was compliance. The first two papers do not examine predisposition to psychneurosis One wonders what difficulties the RFH might have encountered with their staff , or former staff, when they discovered their rediagnosis as hysterics. What was the position with patient confidentiality in those days?

One gets the impression that there was a great deal more going on than we know about.

 

I probably bore you with my suspicious mind. I apologise. Ido however wonder in whose name the application for access to the records was made. I suspect it was McEvedy and that it was to him that permission for use of the data was given. Was Beard's role ever anticipated. It seems doubly odd that, in all probability, he must have been involved with preparation of the two papers for publication before McEvedy had even formally submitted his thesis for assessment.

EDIT it may be worth noting that Beard had collaborated with Slater on other matters. His opinions on hysteria would presumably have been known. Was McEvedy always just the frontman to gain access to material that would have been denied to Beard?

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1321755959920889857


I have taken the liberty of copying the link to this article Autistic thinking in Medicine by a Dr Gordon Easton from 1974, as I am not on twitter and cannot comment there.

It seems significant that views of this nature were published in World Medicine. It is hard to believe that the views expressed were not in line with those of the editor. The editor at the time was Michael O'Donnell, in one of his other careers, before he became famous as a BBC personality. It will be recalled that he, amongst his various other roles, was closely associated with the foundation of Campaign against Health Fraud alongside Richmond and Wessely. Indeed in some accounts Richmond is written out of the script, in favour of O'Donnell and Nick Ross. Perhaps Richmond was merely a front in the days of formation. Certainly the association with O'Donnell must have assisted her wit publication of her strange views in the BMJ.

This is an intriguing web. That Easton article was published shortly after the third of the McEvedy and Beard papers.

As they sat, more research is needed.

 

"Broadcaster vs. medic
Doctors can't ignore their patients' prejudices or advocate therapies that patients don't want. Nor can broadcasters survive by making programmes that people don't want to watch or listen to. Compromises have to be made by both."

Seems Geoff Watts is oblivious to the Psych cabal's approach to ME!

 

I'm guessing you're not on a smartphone, Trish, because you can enlarge the image while still in twitter.

On a laptop etc, select the tweet, then save the pic to your computer. It's ctrl+click then Save image on this Android Chromebook, or r.click then Save on different platforms. Then enlarge in your photo viewer.

I think @RFH1955 is planning to give all the scans a permanent home some time. They're providing a valuable service.

Hope this helps.

 

These comments from 1974, which use the term "virus" disparagingly, are obviously the near point where infectious diseases went from being a medical breakthrough to being almost a myth that only a bad doctor would believe in. The modern, knowledgeable doctor was too intellectual for that.

The idea is still with us. Some virus families such as enteroviruses still seem to get that reaction. As for the comments on hepatitis, well ...