by Druin Burch, UnHerd
As a student of medicine in the library, overwhelmed by facts that hadn’t yet cohered into a point of view, I read medical journals. They brought me relief — a feeling that life as a doctor was full of muddled people, usually trying to do their best, who found purpose in their work. As a young doctor dispirited by the stench of the wards, I returned to them for the same encouragement.
This week the British Medical Journal carried an editorial on “scholasticide”, a term coined by Oxford political theorist Karma Nabulsi. The journal defines it as “deliberate attacks” on a society’s education system during armed conflict and says it “has repeatedly been used as a weapon of occupation and settler colonial violence in Palestine”. The destruction it describes is real: 90% of Gaza’s school buildings, as well as every one of its universities, have been damaged or destroyed. Without question, education is essential to health. The problem is that the editorial’s demands — sanctions, prosecutions, calls for boycott and divestment from Israel — are not prescriptions for a medical problem but a political manifesto.
Medical journals used to present science in a human way. As a student, I wrote for The Lancet about feeling uncomfortable in a clinic when I had a cup of tea and none to offer my patient. Now even the personal stories are often chosen with a nod to ideology. The science, the randomised trials and the observational studies remain, but now they are surrounded less by evocations of the chaotic reality in which doctors and patients find themselves and more by activism.