A humanities loyalist grieved by their current state, I am a student of both literature and medicine and write in a spirit of respect–for persons, for the past, for evidence itself.

In the spirit of constructive skepticism, many of my recent papers concern the evaluation of evidence. What was the state of the evidence when mass screening for prostate cancer was introduced?  What are we to make of Montaigne’s prescient understanding of placebo and nocebo effects?  How to construe James Lind’s confessions of failure even after he successfully conducted the first clinical trial?  What about Freud’s cultivated resemblance to the fantasy hero, Sherlock Holmes?  How do the psychiatric theories advanced in Capote’s In Cold Blood square with the evidence of the text itself?  What are we to think of a drug that passes some trials but not others? 

As a skeptic I shun the practice of looking down on the past from a position of superior knowledge (or pretended knowledge) and oppose crusaders, ideologues and other fundamentalists for whom all things reduce to one. I try to think non-reductively, as in The Springs of Liberty—a book I wrote as in a dream.  If the fox knows many things and the hedgehog knows one big thing, I hold with the foxes; hence the variety of writings listed and posted here.