I am reading Tony Benn’s latest, and last, diaries: A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine. They make poignant reading, charting his growing frailty and his focus on ageing as well as his extraordinary day-to-day commitment to his socialist causes. You feel he needs to stay engaged because it is extrinsically as well as intrinsically worthwhile; it… Read More »
Several students who intercalated a B.Sc en route to qualifying in medicine found their year away from laboratories and lecture theatres a relief, an opportunity to reflect on their futures. Inevitably, a few of them had deeper problems to confront. Because they comprised a small group we got to know them well and became sounding… Read More »
C Wright Mills had a way of articulating the sociological project. In this sense his writings remain ideal resources for teaching purposes. In the extracts from ‘The Power Elite’ (pp.321-2) below he offers an insight into the concept of social structure as well as into its ‘beneath-the-surface’ causal salience for our everyday ‘on-the-surface’ activities and… Read More »
The University of London’s inter-collegiate, intercalated B.Sc in ‘Basic Medical Sciences with Medical Sociology’ (I think) straddled the 1980s. I made its acquaintance very early on, in 1975, although I was not among its founders. It survived until 1997 and during that time afforded an exceptional teaching opportunity for we sociologists employed in London medical… Read More »
There are worse plights than being drawn back into the world of C Wright Mills. I have been re-reading The Power Elite, as some will be aware. On page 245 of my old edition from undergraduate days I chanced upon two statements on the sociological undertaking that like so much else in his output continue… Read More »
What I here call the ‘jigsaw model’ of logics, relations and configurations still makes sense to me. It is, however, easier to define than to illustrate via application. ‘Does it work?’ is the question. Just for a change I am going to introduce it by reference to the sociology of health and illness. Models in… Read More »
I have alluded to a publication or two issuing from the epilepsy research. Neither of these was my first, and therein lies a tale or two. Anthony Hopkins was keen that we give a joint talk to the neurology section of the Royal Society of Medicine. We had no results, but hey! They were his… Read More »
In 1978 I was appointed full-time lecturer at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, which was to be my base until UCL chewed up and spat out a few bits before swallowing the rest whole in 1987. My office was a dark, dusty, dingy room in, if I recall rightly, Hanson Street. In my desk I… Read More »
This is for me a blog with a difference. Ever since my undergraduate days, 1968-71, I have been attracted to the writing of C Wright Mills. It is of course a common form of magnetism. For a variety of reasons I have re-read his The Power Elite, a report and analysis of America’s ‘governors’ in… Read More »
I did not meet Margot Jefferys immediately on crossing the threshold at Bedford College in 1972. Based then in Peto Place, it was George Brown’s office I entered. But this was her Unit, and I came to know her well and to appreciate – no, more than that – the deftness of her political touch,… Read More »