Theodore Dalrymple

Here is a searing account-probably the best yet published-of life in the underclass and why it persists as it does. Theodore Dalrymple, a British psychiatrist who treats the poor in a slum hospital and a prison in England, has seemingly seen it all. Yet in listening to and observing his patients, he is continually astonished by the latest twist of depravity that exceeds even his own considerable experience. Dalrymple's key insight in Life at the Bottom is that long-term poverty is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values, one that is continually reinforced by an elite culture searching for victims. This culture persuades those at the bottom that they have no responsibility for their actions and are not the molders of their own lives. Drawn from the pages of the cutting-edge political and cultural quarterly City Journal, Dalrymple's book draws upon scores of eye-opening, true-life vignettes that are by turns hilariously funny, chillingly horrifying, and all too revealing-sometimes all at once. And Dalrymple writes in prose that transcends journalism and achieves the quality of literature.

This new collection of essays bears the unmistakable stamp of Theodore Dalrymple's bracingly clearsighted view of the human condition. In these twenty-six pieces, Dr. Dalrymple ranges over literature and ideas, from Shakespeare to Marx, from the break-down of Islam to the legalization of drugs. The book includes "When Islam Breaks Down," named by David Brooks of the New York Times as the best journal article of 2004.Informed by years of medical practice in a wide variety of settings, Dr. Dalrymple's acquaintance with the outer limits of human experience allows him to discover the universal in the local and the particular, and makes him impatient with the humbug and obscurantism that have too long marred our social and political discourse.His essays are incisive yet undogmatic, beautifully composed and devoid of disfiguring jargon. Our Culture, What's Left of It is a book that restores our faith in the central importance of literature and criticism to our civilization.

Alternate cover edition can be found here. Drawing on his long experience of working with thousands of criminals and the mentally disturbed, Theodore Dalrymple writes about the hidden sentimentality that he feels is suffocating public life. Under the multiple guises of raising children well, caring for the underprivileged, assisting the less able and doing good generally, we are achieving quite the opposite for the single purpose of feeling good about ourselves. Dalrymple tackles the subject through social, political, popular and literary issues and shows the perverse results when we abandon logic in favour of the cult of feeling.

Today, the word prejudice has come to seem synonymous with bigotry; therefore the only way a person can establish freedom from bigotry is by claiming to have wiped his mind free from prejudice. English psychiatrist and writer Theodore Dalrymple shows that freeing the mind from prejudice is not only impossible, but entails intellectual, moral and emotional dishonesty. The attempt to eradicate prejudice has several dire consequences for the individual and society as a whole.

In Admirable Evasions , Theodore Dalrymple explains why human self-understanding has not been bettered by the false promises of the different schools of psychological thought. Most psychological explanations of human behavior are not only ludicrously inadequate oversimplifications, argues Dalrymple, they are socially harmful in that they allow those who believe in them to evade personal responsibility for their actions and to put the blame on a multitude of on their childhood, their genes, their neurochemistry, even on evolutionary pressures.Dalrymple reveals how the fashionable schools of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, modern neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology all prevent the kind of honest self-examination that is necessary to the formation of human character. Instead, they promote self-obsession without self-examination, and the gross overuse of medicines that affect the mind.Admirable Evasions also considers metaphysical objections to the assumptions of psychology, and suggests that literature is a far more illuminating window into the human condition than psychology could ever hope to be.

Theodore Dalrymple's new book of essays follows on the extraordinary success of his earlier collections, Life at the Bottom and Our Culture, What's Left of It. No social critic today is more adept and incisive in exploring the state of our culture and the ideas that are changing our ways of life. In Not with a Bang But a Whimper, he takes the measure of our cultural decline, with special attention to Britain-its bureaucratic muddle, oppressive welfare mentality, and aimless youth-all pursued in the name of democracy and freedom. He shows how terrorism and the growing numbers of Muslim minorities have changed our public life. Also here are Mr. Dalrymple's trenchant observations on artists and ideologues, and on the questionable treatment of criminals and the mentally disturbed, his area of medical interest.

What is life like in a totalitarian regime? It is a question which has always fascinated Theodore Dalrymple - whose father was a strict if slightly inconsistent Communist.The Wilder Shores of Marx sees the writer visit five countries which still labour under systems inspired by the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and other luminaries of the left.

More than half a century ago, George Orwell wrote an essay about the decline of the English murder. Since the 1990s, Theodore Dalrymple has witnessed its modern variety in real life. For over a quarter of a century he has treated and examined many more murderers than most as a prison doctor, psychiatrist, and court expert in some of Britain's most deprived areas. Here, he delves deep into his life of personal encounters with the murderous underclass to determine what has changed overtime and what has not. Inimitably, his unique portrait of modern criminals is at the same time a parable of dysfunction in our own culture. Through his experiences, he exposes today's vicious cult of denial, blaming and psychobabble that hides behind a corrosive sentiment of caring. Illustrated with scores of eye-opening, true-life vignettes, The Knife Went In is in turn hilariously funny, chillingly horrifying, and always unexpectedly revealing. Taken together, this lifetime of experience is a clear and unsentimental mirror in which we view modern progress without its varnish.

This is the earliest - and funniest - collection of Dalrymple's 'If Symptoms Persist' pieces for The Spectator.

Theodore Dalrymple's work focuses on the moral decay of modern culture and the pernicious effect of political correctness on society. Anything Goes is a collection of some of his finest work written between 2005 and 2009 for New English Review . A note on the cover from New English Review This jazz age photograph by Alfred Cheney Johnston reflects the classical conviction that the human form expresses a spiritual level of beauty, the artwork of God, if you will. It is also a statement about the essential humanism of Dr. Dalrymple's work. One cannot look at that figure and see an animal or a machine. Rather one sees something truly beautiful and truly human.

For hundreds of years, addiction to drugs has seemed dangerous but with a hint of glamour. Addicts are a mystery to those who have never been one. They are presumed to be in touch with profound enlightenments of which non-addicts are ignorant. Theodore Dalrymple shows that doctors, psychologists, and social workers have always known these drug addictions to be false! They have created these myths to build lucrative method of expensive quasi-treatment.

Western Europe is in a strangely neurotic condition of being smug and terrified at the same time. On the one hand, Europeans believe they have at last created an ideal social and political system in which man can live comfortably. In many ways, things have never been better on the old continent. On the other hand, there is growing anxiety that Europe is quickly falling behind in an aggressive, globalized world. Europe is at the forefront of nothing, its demographics are rapidly transforming in unsettling ways, and the ancient threat of barbarian invasion has resurfaced in a fresh manifestation.In The New Vichy Syndrome, Theodore Dalrymple traces this malaise back to the great conflicts of the last century and their devastating effects upon the European psyche. From issues of religion, class, colonialism, and nationalism, Europeans hold a “miserablist” view of their history, one that alternates between indifference and outright contempt of the past. Today’s Europeans no longer believe in anything but personal economic security, an increased standard of living, shorter working hours, and long vacations in exotic locales.The result, Dalrymple asserts, is an unwillingness to preserve European achievements and the dismantling of western culture by Europeans themselves. As vapid hedonism and aggressive Islamism fill this cultural void, Europeans have no one else to blame for their plight.

Writer Theodore Dalrymple drove the four hundred miles from Glasgow to London recently, and found practically every yard of roadside to be littered with rubbish flapping in the wind like Buddhist prayer flags, which prompted him to write this heart-felt polemic about modern Britain. What does it mean when a country tips its rubbish anywhere it likes? At the very least, it suggests that a modern Englishman's street has become his dining room...This short, brief book, then, sifts through the excesses of Britain's public 'dining room' and analyses what litter says about our brave new world. Have we become barbarians?

As Charles Taylor begins a 50-year sentence for his role in the brutal civil war in Liberia, Theodore Dalrymple’s memoir of a visit to the country, and its capital Monrovia, makes fascinating reading.Founded in 1822 as a refuge for freed African slaves from America, Liberia is a curiosity which became a catastrophe.For well over 100 years, it was a civilised and relatively prosperous country under the rule of Americo-Liberians, but it was thrown into chaos in 1980 when Samuel Doe led a revolution of those considering themselves ‘natives’.The incumbent president was murdered in his bed, and his cabinet ministers paraded naked through the streets of Monrovia before being summarily executed by firing squad on the beach.Doe – a brutal and incompetent tribalist (also, say some, a cannibal) – was himself overthrown by Charles Taylor in 1990.Dalrymple arrives in Monrovia the following year, where giggling Liberians show him a videotape of Doe’s torture and murder at the hands of Taylor’s rival, the majestically self-titled Brigadier-General Field-Marshal Prince Y Johnson. In the film, Johnson – now a Liberian senator – calmly sips a Budweiser as the naked Doe’s ears are hacked off. Unsurprisingly, Dalrymple forms the professional opinion that Johnson is a psychopath.Monrovia was once a peaceful and reasonably ordered city; now, it has been almost completely sacked. Burnt-out cars are everywhere; doors have been chopped up for firewood; rubble lines the streets, with the vandalism forming a systematic attempt to destroy every vestige of the old regime (and, the author speculates, of civilisation itself). The destruction of the university and library, for instance, seems to be little more that the revenge of the ignorant upon the educated. In a local hospital (once the pride of West Africa, now long ruined and abandoned), the professor of surgery’s office has been ransacked, and medical books and papers have been ripped up; in another, infant welfare records have been smeared with faeces. In the wrecked Centennial Hall, the body of a beautiful Steinway grand piano lies on the floor, its legs senselessly sawn off. In a Lutheran church, Dalrymple finds the floor covered in the blood silhouettes of 600 Liberians massacred by Doe’s soldiers.Dalrymple – who achieves the near-impossible by making a book about such barbarism at times amusing – lays much of the blame for what happened at the feet of Western intellectuals and their African counterparts.Monrovia Mon Amour is a profoundly moving and interesting book about a country which is little-understood and less visited.

'Africans, I discovered, have a unique talent for finding happiness where others would find only misery.' While working in Tanzania in the 1980s, British doctor Theodore Dalrymple hatched a plan to cross Africa using only public transport. Avoiding planes, his journey took him by bus, lorry, train, boat and canoe. Along the way he encountered corruption, poverty and oppression as well as pragmatic and cheerful travelling companions and the result is this humorous, beautifully-written and sharply-observed travelogue. Theodore Dalrymple is the author of many books including: If Symptoms Persist, Second Opinion and The Policeman and the Brothel.

Journalist, writer and prison psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple writes a light-hearted memoir of his lifelong addiction to thinking and how serendipity led him on a journey of discovery.

Rare 1995 Andre Deutsch (London) printing, which is the true first edition.

Most of the antipodean beachcombers were heavy drinkers. It was a way of life with them. An Australian trader consulted me one day because of a serious drink problem he had. ‘I only had ten cans yesterday, doc,’ he said. ‘And today I haven’t had any. I just don’t feel like it. Today’s the first day in ten years I haven’t had a drink.’ I looked at him. He was yellow; he had hepatitis. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you’ve got hepatitis. That’s why you don’t want to drink. What’s more, you mustn’t drink for at least three months.’ ‘Oh!’ he said.‘And I see from looking at your hospital records that sometimes you vomit blood in the morning.’ ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ ‘It’s not a terribly good sign, you know.’ ‘Oh, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I thought everyone did it.’ He returned three months later. To my surprise he had not touched a drop. ‘Hey doc!’ he said. ‘I feel terrific, I haven’t felt this good in years. Why’s that then?’‘Why do you think?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know. You’re the doc, you should know.’ ‘Well, for the first time in ten years you haven’t got a hangover.’ ‘Oh.’ A look of deep cogitation passed over his face like the shadow of a cloud over a field on a summer’s day.‘Does that mean I can go back on the beer?’ Some men become doctors out of a noble desire to save lives, or because they seek money and prestige; Anthony Daniels did so because he was middle class, because he had to do something and because his father – not a man to be lightly gainsaid – pushed him into it.But this inauspicious beginning led to a great career – if not as a doctor (though he became a respected consultant psychiatrist), then as a doctor-writer.Both in his own name, and under his better-known nom de plume of Theodore Dalrymple, Daniels is a prolific author whose work has spanned 30 years and much of the globe.His formidable energy is equalled in his prose by a clarity and elegance which few can match, and it is this, as well as his unusual experience, originality of insight and unconventional views (by modern standards), which have won him worldwide acclaim.But although he is read – as Theodore Dalrymple – in almost every country on earth, relatively little is known about him.Fool or Physician, which was his second book and remains his most personal, offers his followers a small insight into his past.It details his reluctant entry into medical school (‘I specialised in doing and knowing the least necessary to pass the examinations’), his earliest ventures in medicine in a small midlands town and his subsequent work overseas when, bored almost to tears by life in the NHS, he travels first to the then-Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa (as a ‘well-meaning liberal’ his ‘problem was to discover where in the world pure evil still confronted pure good, where I could demonstrate that I was on the side of the angels, but at the same time live comfortably and register with the General Medical Council’), and later to the Gilbert Islands, a pacific paradise brimming with drunken expatriates, eccentrics and lunatics.

The cultural death of God has created a conundrum for intellectuals. How could a life stripped of ultimate meaning be anything but absurd? How was man to live? How could he find direction in a world of no direction? What would he tell his children that could make their lives worthwhile? What is the ground of morality?Existentialism is the literary cri de coeur resulting from the realization that without God, everything good, true and beautiful in human life is destined to be destroyed in a pitiless material cosmos. Theodore Dalrymple and Kenneth Francis examine the main existentialist works, from Ecclesiastes to the Theatre of the Absurd, each man coming from a different perspective. Francis is a believer, Dalrymple is not, but both empathize with the struggle to find meaning in a seemingly meaningless universe.Part literary criticism, part philosophical exploration, this book holds many surprising gems of insight from two of the most interesting minds of our time.

Farewell Fear is a collection of Theodore Dalrymple’s finest essays covering a wide range of topics written for New English Review between 2009 and 2012 plus one or two which have never been published before. His first such collection was the best-selling Anything Goes (2011).

The New England Journal of Medicine is one of the most important general medical journals in the world. Doctors rely on the conclusions it publishes, and most do not have the time to look beyond abstracts to examine methodology or question assumptions. Many of its pronouncements are conveyed by the media to a mass audience, which is likely to take them as authoritative. But is this trust entirely warranted?Theodore Dalrymple, a doctor retired from practice, turned a critical eye upon a full year of the Journal , alert to dubious premises and to what is left unsaid. In False Positive , he demonstrates that many of the papers it publishes reach conclusions that are not only flawed, but obviously flawed. He exposes errors of reasoning and conspicuous omissions apparently undetected by the editors. In some cases, there is reason to suspect actual corruption.When the Journal takes on social questions, its perspective is solidly politically correct. Practically no debate on social issues appears in the printed version, and highly debatable points of view go unchallenged. The Journal reads as if there were only one possible point of view, though the American medical profession (to say nothing of the extensive foreign readership) cannot possibly be in total agreement with the stances taken in its pages. It is thus more megaphone than sounding board.There is indeed much in the New England Journal of Medicine that deserves praise and admiration. But this book should encourage the general reader to take a constructively critical view of medical news and to be wary of the latest medical doctrines.

EVERY DAY, OUR NEWSPAPERS bring news of staggering medical breakthroughs which promise treatments for this, cures for that, and, occasionally, help with the other.Readers are first terrified with the news that eating X will give them cancer – then reassured that drinking Y will prevent it.The following day, it turns out that Y is the carcinogen, and X the cure.Little wonder many of us spend our lives bamboozled, or turn off altogether.Luckily, the world-famous doctor-writer Theodore Dalrymple has read the original scientific papers in the medical journals on which the newspaper scare stories are based.The results – published in this ‘dip into’ collection of short and highly readable essays, full of Dalrymple’s classic dry wit and beautiful phrasing – may or may not reassure you, depending on where you started out.

When I was a young man I thought that metaphysics was the most exciting (and important) thing in the world. I wish now that I had not wasted so much time on the imponderable questions of metaphysics but had used it to more worthwhile effect. Rather than study philosophy, I should have studied insects. In the little essays that follow, I have no grand theory to prove, no single message to convey. Small things and slight occurrences have caught my attention and caused me to reflect a little. I hope only to please the reader. — Theodore Dalrymple

What is written without pain, said Doctor Johnson, is rarely read with pleasure. Rarely perhaps, but not, I hope, for the little essays in this book were written, I must confess, without much angst. In part this was because, in writing them, I had no thesis to prove, no axe to grind, except that the world is both infinitely interesting and amusing, and provides us with an inexhaustible source of material for philosophical reflection. Many of the subjects treated of in this book were found by serendipity or came to me in flashes – it would be immodest to call them of inspiration – of previously unsuspected connection and interest. I can only hope that they entertain the reader as they have entertained me. At least they will do no harm, in compliance with the first principle of medical ethics. — Theodore Dalrymple

The Examined Life is a satire on the health-and-safety culture by the world-renowned doctor-writer Theodore Dalrymple. Dalrymple’s un-named anti-hero is a man who takes to heart every tabloid newspaper health scare, guards himself against every conceivable illness and worries endlessly about his mortality. He wears protective clothing to go shopping (though he prefers to shop online, of course) and every inch of unprotected skin is smeared in various creams and lotions. Unfortunately, his caution is his eventual undoing, as this elegantly-written and amusing book reaches its climax.

Travelling to the hard-living Dylan Thomas’s Boathouse in Laugharne, Wales, psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple considered along the way another foible – the folly of eminent people. Praised for their attainments in one area, high-achievers are more often than not prone to unexpected failings elsewhere. Enter a large cast of anti- and vivisectionists, surgeons, theologians, philosophers, admirals, judges, astrophysicists, Nazi-leaning homoeopaths, and writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, P.G. Wodehouse, and Conan Doyle. In his pithy and amusing style, Dalrymple casts a sobering light on an insuppressible trait of ours – the fallibility of the human mind.

Theodore Dalrymple, almost singlehandedly, revived the languishing Essay and in so doing became Britain’s answer to Montaigne. In this, his first foray into the Short Story form, he proves himself a rival of Anton Chekhov. His many devoted fans will be delighted. _________________________ Some truth can be told only in the form of fiction. That is why I chose to write these stories. -- Theodore Dalrymple

Life expectancy has increased dramatically in the last fifty years, yet we have never been so obsessed with our health. As our state of health improves, our anxiety about our health does not decrease, but on the contrary increases almost exponentially. The less likely we are to die in the near future, the more avidly we consume information about what may go wrong with us. The media whips up scare stories about potential epidemics-from listeria to salmonella poisoning and mad cow disease-and we believe them implicitly. Hardly a month passes without the announcement of some dire new threat to our wellbeing, or some miracle cure.Why are we now so obsessed with health matters? Should we be worried, or are we worrying without reason? In his controversial and highly provocative new book, Theodore Dalrymple takes a scalpel to many of the current assumptions-and myths-about health matters that so preoccupy us. As his many readers will know, Dalrymple does not mince words. His conclusions are bound to provoke a storm of comment.

An inspired anthology about physical and psychological illness, healing, and healers--featuring a brilliant array of classic and contemporary writers, from Anton Chekhov to Lorrie Moore.This unique anthology gathers fictional tales of sickness and of healing, both physical and psychological, from a wide variety of times and perspectives. Some of these writers were themselves physicians, notably Anton Chekhov, Arthur Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, William Carlos Williams, and Mikhail Bulgakov. Bulgakov's story, taken from A Country Doctor's Notebook , draws on his early experience as a young doctor in rural Russia a century ago, while Anna Kavan's story, from her collection Asylum Piece , is based on her experience of mental illness. Guy de Maupassant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, J. G. Ballard, Robert Heinlein, Alice Munro, and Lorrie Moore are among the other writers of medical adventures that fill these pages. From Chekhov's "A Doctor's Visit" and William Carlos Williams's "The Paid Nurse" to Dorothy Parker's "Lady with a Lamp," O. Henry's "Let Me Feel Your Pulse," and Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies," the stories gathered here are peopled by a colorful and varied cast of doctors, nurses, and patients.Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

Ramses was the best dog in the world, the cleverest, friendliest, most expressive, understanding, amusing dog that ever was, and it was only a happy coincidence that he happened to be ours.