The Paradox of
Progress
Kindle Edition 2012
'James Willis
has written a book that is both delightful and important. It is, in many
respects, a serious book, but the touch is so light and so often illuminated by
wit, that reading it is a joy and the journey is fun.'
FROM PROFESSOR JAMES McCORMICK'S FOREWORD
'Sensitive, humorous and eminently
readable, it offers the accumulated wisdom and vision of a deeply concerned
doctor'
BRITISH JOURNAL OF GENERAL PRACTICE
'The book can make you laugh and cry, but
brings you back to the real reasons why people stay working in healthcare'
HEALTH SERVICE JOURNAL
'Beautifully written'
JOURNAL OF THE
ASSOCIATION FOR QUALITY IN HEALTHCARE
152 Pages....Paper....£21.95....ISBN 1 85775
063 2
READERS COMMENTS
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Friends in
Low Places
James
Willis' book says something so essential and vital that it needs to be shouted
from skyscrapers...
Gillie Bolton's review -
The Journal of Medical Humanities,
June 2002
...It also,
however, is about something as simple as the emperor wearing no clothes. This is
that a denial that life-as-it-is-lived is wonderfully, hopeless-ly, chaotic and
complex - is not just doomed to failure, but will inevitably cause untold
damage. Our society is not only attempting to deny, but to constrain life to
become structured, controllable, controlled. There seems to be an insane
belief that life can be controlled by ticking boxes, by diligently reading
instructions, before doing anything, thinking anything, being anything.
Gillie Bolton's review continued
214
Pages....Paper....£21.95....ISBN 1 85775 404 2
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Some articles and lectures:
Why
machines need people
RSM
Video
John Fry is the pre-eminent
exemplar of the generation of free-thinking doctors who, acting entirely on
their own initiative, turned general practice in Britain, and subsequently
throughout much of the world, into a modern scientific discipline. Now that the
process of modernisation has run on for fifty years, making general practice in
Britain more machine-like than Fry could possibly have imagined, it seems that
the human qualities he exemplified are no longer necessary and are in fact
dangerous. Developing ideas which James Willis originally derived from
observations in his own general practice, he will show that this is a tragic,
potentially disastrous, but not yet irremediable, mistake. "
The 2010 John Fry Lecture at the Royal Society of Medicine 14 July 2010
The Human Side of Medicine
"So what I want to talk about – is a kind of
moving out from personal, seat-of-the-pants practice based on
independent professionalism, to a kind of fly-by-wire practice in
which, as in so many other aspects of modern life, our dealings are with the
front-end, the interface, of some intermediary system rather than with the thing
itself. "
Talk to the South West Trainers Group, Newquay, 26 November 2004
The Sea Monster and the Whirlpool
"Not only must doctors remain scientists in order to serve
their patients, steering between the Scylla and the Charybdis of my metaphor.
I also believe they have a unique contribution to make to science itself.
General practice, through its academic wing, through its Royal College, but
especially through its individual practitioners, doing the best and perhaps
one of the most important jobs in the world, can make a contribution to the
next step forward in our understanding. Provided they have confidence in the
validity of their view of life, and provided society gives them the freedom
and the respect they need to do their job."
Keynote Address on 'Science' to Royal
College of General Practitioners' 50th Anniversary Symposium - Birmingham
International Conference Centre
Listen to the
Juggler
"Balance. Tradition. I am proud of our traditions in this country. And proud of our famous balance – our gift for compromise. I do not wish to see all this thrown away in the name of change. We must look back, and as we move forward into the excitement of the new, we must keep our balance with the best of the old."
The 2001 George Swift Lecture 16 Oct 2001
The Heart of the Matter
"The next stage of 'progress' may well involve our lightening-up and accepting that life is not perfectible, that risk cannot be eliminated and that the role of society is to celebrate diversity and to set the limits of acceptable behaviour as widely as possible, never to direct the details of behaviour."
Address given at the Royal College of Physicians on 29 Nov 2000.
Maintenance'
An appreciation of Pirsig's famous book
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
which was a major influence.
Published in
the December 2000 issue of Medical Humanities, in the series Medicine
through the Novel..
Rules can never describe life, they can only set limits
Questioning proposals
for revalidation of the medical profession.
Article in the British Journal of General Practice
(Reference no 89 in Friends in Low Places )
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Relevant articles by others:
Medical Humanities: a vision and some
cautionary notes. By Stephen Pattisson
An excellent analysis of the possible
"death course of a discipline",
reproduced (with permission) from the Medical Humanities Edition of the Journal
of Medical Ethics, June 2003
After Bristol:
the humbling of the medical profession
An excellent analysis by Dr Michael Fitzpatrick
Professor David
Morrell's Presidential Address to the British Medical Association July 1994
ignored at the time, and never published, but how right he was!
Memoir by a 'real person'
if ever there was one, one of my patients:
General nurse training in the early '30s
by Margaret Staples, SRN
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Page modified
23 January 2012
