Death and Doctor Hornbook by Robert Burns: a view from medical history.

Robert Burns's poem, Death and Doctor Hornbook, 1785, tells of the drunken narrator's late night encounter with Death. The Grim Reaper is annoyed that ‘Dr Hornbook’, a local schoolteacher who has taken to selling medications and giving medical advice, is successfully thwarting his efforts to gather victims. The poet fears that the local gravedigger will be unemployed but Death reassures him that this will not be the case since Hornbook kills more than he cures.

Improving medical students' attitudes towards the chronic sick: a role for social science research.

Background: Many medical students are negatively disposed toward the elderly and chronic sick. The present study assessed the impact of a community-based teaching initiative, the Life History Project, on students' attitudes to these groups.

Methods: A questionnaire including Likert based responses and free text comments was distributed to all first-year MBChB students after completion of their Life History coursework.

A witness seminar: the development of old age psychiatry in Britain, 1960-1989. Themes, lessons and highlights.

Objective: To create a record of the development of old age psychiatry in Britain, as seen through the eyes of some of the people who participated in building it, from the earliest days until it was officially recognised as a specialty by the Department of Health in 1989.

Method: Group reminiscences and discussions in the format of a witness seminar which was audio-recorded and transcribed. Witnesses also provided written biographical information.

Re-expressing the division of British medicine under the NHS: the importance of locality in general practitioners' oral histories.

This paper, based on original oral history research in a single locality, re-examines the impact of the structural division of British medicine, especially between community and hospital-based medicine, on rank-and-file general practice. Interviews were carried out with 29 retired and practising National Health Service (NHS) general practitioners (GPs) in Paisley, Scotland. In contrast to the historiography and literature of academic general practice, most retired and working family doctors who were interviewed rejected the significance of the division, and instead placed emphasis on the positive relationships between primary and secondary care in their locality.