For most people wellbeing means more than exercise, eating well and avoiding bad habits. If we attend to what gives life meaning we are more likely to find contentment and balance. This talk will explore some of the many ways to wellbeing from research evidence and our own personal experience.

This talk is delivered by Rhonda Riachi, Project Development Officer at Oxford Centre for Spirituality & Wellbeing.

Rhonda works in the Faculty of Health & Life Sciences at Oxford Brookes University on projects supporting the wellbeing of healthcare staff and patients. She wrote her Masters dissertation on person-centred communication in dementia care.

Blackwell’s are delighted to be hosting a special Hallowe’en event exploring black magic, with Thomas Waters and Lucie McKnight Hardy as they discuss their books ‘Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times’ and ‘Water Shall Refuse Them’.

‘Cursed Britain’

Historian Thomas Waters here explores the lives of cursed or bewitched people, along with the witches and witch-busters who helped and harmed them. Waters takes us on a fascinating journey from Scottish islands to the folklore-rich West Country, from the immense territories of the British Empire to metropolitan London. We learn why magic caters to deep-seated human needs but see how it can also be abused, and discover how witchcraft survives by evolving and changing. Along the way, we examine an array of remarkable beliefs and rituals, from traditional folk magic to diverse spiritualities originating in Africa and Asia.

This is a tale of cynical quacks and sincere magical healers, depressed people and furious vigilantes, innocent victims and rogues who claimed to possess evil abilities. Their spellbinding stories raise important questions about the state’s role in regulating radical spiritualities, the fragility of secularism and the true nature of magic.

Thomas Waters is lecturer in history at Imperial College London and a specialist in the modern history of witchcraft and magic.

‘Water Shall Refuse Them’

The heatwave of 1976. Following the accidental drowning of her sister, sixteen-year-old Nif and her family move to a small village on the Welsh borders to escape their grief. But rural seclusion doesn’t bring any relief. As her family unravels, Nif begins to put together her own form of witchcraft – collecting talismans from the sun-starved land. That is, until she meets Mally, a teen boy who takes a keen interest in her, and has his own secret rites to divulge.

Lucie McKnight Hardy is the debut author of ‘Water Shall Refuse Them’, an atmospheric coming-of-age novel, full of magical suspense.

Tickets cost £5. There will be a bar serving an array of magical potions from 6:45pm – 7pm. Fancy dress is welcomed. For all enquiries please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.

The AfOx insaka is a gathering for sharing ideas and knowledge about Africa-focused research with speakers from diverse and varied academic disciplines. There are two events each term.

Speakers for the first AfOx insaka in the new academic year are Dr Robtel Neajai Pailey, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Oxford Department of International Development and Dr Jacob McKnight, Senior Researcher, Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health.

At this AfOx talk, Robtel Neajai Pailey uses her anti-corruption children’s books to argue that equipping children with verbal tools to question the confusing ethical codes of adults can revolutionise how we talk and theorise about corruption.

Jake McKnight is a Health Systems Researcher at the Oxford Health Systems Collaboration (OHSCAR). He was originally a logistician for MSF in Angola and Somalia, before conducting his PhD research in Ethiopia. He then read for the MSc. in African Studies at Oxford, before completing his PhD at Said Business School, where he concentrated on healthcare reform in Ethiopia. Jake will talk about the failures and successes of projects he’s studied or been involved in, reflecting on the idea that ‘Africa Works’, and as researchers and implementors, it’s up to us to fit local cultures rather to try to ‘fix’ them.

Join prize-winning author Olivia Laing in conversation with Professor Dame Hermione Lee.

Olivia Laing is the author of To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City. Her latest book, Crudo, is a real-time novel about the turbulent summer of 2017. It was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and a New York Times notable book of 2018 and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize. In 2019 it won the 100th James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Sarah Weir OBE, Chief Executive, Design Council, will lecture on ‘Designing the Future: Who is doing it?’ She will consider the question of what design is – a mindset and skillset; critical thinking and creativity combined; much more than aesthetics.

The Lady English Lecture Series marks the College’s continuing commitment to the education and advancement of women and promotes the contributions made by women to the University and to public life more generally.

A growing middle class in the developing world, as well as increasing concerns about the healthfulness, environmental footprint and inhumaneness of conventional livestock production have given rise to neo-Malthusian concerns about how to address what seems insatiable demand for protein.

While some have doubled down on calls for reducing meat consumption, so far the most visible response has been a huge wave of innovation in a variety of what are now being called “alternative proteins.” Designed to capture the “flexitarian” market, these include insect-based foods, protein-rich “superfoods,” simulated plant-based meat and dairy substitutes, and cellular/bioengineered meat.

Their rapid development begs two crucial questions, however. How did protein become the macronutrient of concern to begin? Will protein’s new substantiations be any more nutritious and ecological than that which it substitutes? In this talk, Guthman will elaborate on what is being done in the name of protein and provide provisional answers to these questions.

Please register via the link provided.

The logic and principles behind the drive for evidence-based health care are so compelling that often the limitations of evidence go unacknowledged. Despite a strong evidence base demonstrating the health risks associated with higher body weights, and health professionals routinely instructing patients to lose weight to improve their health, the incidence of obesity is predicted to continue to rise. Calling on his research into the relationships between obesity, inequality and health, Oli Williams – a fellow of The Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute – will argue that when it comes to reducing the burden on, and improving, health care a more critical approach to the way we generate, select, apply and communicate evidence is needed.

Oli Williams completed his PhD in the Department of Sociology at the University of Leicester. He was subsequently awarded the NIHR CLAHRC West Dan Hill Fellowship in Health Equity which he held at the University of Bath. He later re-joined the University of Leicester in the Department of Health Sciences working in the SAPPHIRE Group and is now based at King’s College London after being awarded a THIS Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship. His research focuses on health inequalities, the promotion of healthy lifestyles, obesity, weight stigma, equitable intervention and co-production. He co-founded the art collective Act With Love (AWL) to promote social change. The Weight of Expectation comic is one example of their work, view others at: www.actwithlove.co.uk In recognition of his work on weight stigma the British Science Association invited Oli to deliver the Margaret Mead Award Lecture for Social Sciences at the British Science Festival 2018.

This talk is being held as part of the Qualitative Research Methods course which is part of the Evidence-Based Health Care Programme. This is a free event and members of the public are welcome to attend.

Join Galician poet Chus Pato and Canadian translator Erín Moure for a reading from Chus Pato’s new book of poems, Un libre favor.

The event marks the completion of their residency with The Queen’s College and is followed by a drinks reception until 7.15pm.

All are welcome; sign up on through Eventbrite to let us know if you plan to come.

The Night Sky Show will take you on an epic journey from our celestial back yard and across the cosmos.

Comedy, astronomy and so much more. A show for anyone with a slight interest or more in the night sky. A night for those who want to laugh, learn and enjoy.

A fun, entertaining and memorable evening which will help you understand and enjoy the heavens above and universe beyond. Helpful for the next time you’re stargazing, or when you just look up and wonder.

We’ll skip the heavy going science and hard to follow explanations. The Universe and everything within will be presented in an entertaining and easily absorbed way.

AN AMAZING SHOW FOR EVERYONE

This won’t be a boring astronomy talk, it will be a spectacular astronomy talk anyone can enjoy!

Learn about the constellations, stars, planets and the deeper cosmos. The sheer scale of the universe and the mythology and stories of the night sky.

Presented by Adrian West – A passionate and experienced astronomer. Better known as VirtualAstro on Twitter and Facebook. He has one of the largest independent astronomy and space accounts on social media. He’s passionate about the night sky and inspiring people to look up by being interesting, down-to-earth and fun!

Adrian has written many astronomy and space related articles for various popular online science magazines. He has also written guides and articles for the BBC, Met office and National Trust to name a few.

If you look up and wonder, The Night Sky Show is for you.

SO LETS EXPLORE!

Biographer and critic Lucasta Miller will give this term’s lecture in memory of Harry M Weinrebe, philanthropist and founder of the Dorset Foundation.

A former visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing and Beaufort visiting fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Lucasta Miller is the author of The Brontë Myth (Jonathan Cape, 2001) and L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon (Jonathan Cape, 2019), the Celebrated ‘Female Byron’.

The OCLW Weinrebe Lectures are an annual series named in memory of Harry Weinrebe, a philanthropist and the founder of the Dorset Foundation.A

Poor diet is the leading risk factor for ill health in the UK, carrying more risk than smoking or hypertension.

But in an era where we seem to be constantly bombarded with often conflicting messages about our diets, is all this information actually making us any healthier? How can we cut through media hysteria and use the science to make wise choices about the food we eat and how can the Government make sensible policy decisions to help with the impact our consumption habits have on our health.

Please register via the link provided.

The increased reliance of health systems on the digital record as the primary mechanism for storing data on consultations and other health interactions has opened new opportunities for research, healthcare innovation, and health policy. The electronic health record (eHR) is now ubiquitous in many countries, in hospital and primary care settings, and in some countries their health systems in terms of reporting patient care activity are essentially ‘paperless’.

Health systems globally are also facing accelerating challenges as they seek to deliver better value healthcare against the background of increasing levels of chronic disease, ageing populations, financial pressures and demands on public spending. Digital health tools and services are held up to be part of the solution to these challenges, potentially offering low-cost and patient-centred solutions.

There has been huge investment in Big Data research in health, particularly in relation to digitised imaging and automated reporting and predictive modelling using phenotypic and increasingly genetic data. There have also been similar gains in more applied research that explores the potential of accessing the huge quantum of data held in the eHR, and linkage of these data to other national or regional databases, such as mortality records or cancer data. This session will explore some of the applications for routine data research, illustrated by projects that have resulted in research success and better healthcare.

This will include the exemplars of using large eHR platforms and prescribing data platforms to create infrastructure for i) common disease surveillance, such as the UK RCGP RSC; ii) generation and validation of disease risk assessment tools, such as QRisk scores; iii) pragmatic electronic follow up trials; iv) within practice systems dashboard feedback reports, eg data normalised to regional and national rates on prescribing and investigation physician activity; v) traditional epidemiological linkage studies; and vi) linkage to long term phenotypic follow up of established disease cohorts.

Richard Hobbs is Nuffield Professor of Primary Care at the University of Oxford, and Head of the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences. He has served a decade as National Director of the National Institute for Health Research’s School for Primary Care Research and was Director of the NHS Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) Review panel from 2005-09. He has served many national and international scientific and research funding boards in UK, Ireland, Canada, and WHO, including the BHF Council, British Primary Care Cardiovascular Society, and the ESC Council for Cardiovascular Primary Care. He currently chairs the European Primary Care Cardiovascular Society, a WONCA Special Interest Group.

He is one of the world’s leading academics in primary care, and has developed at Oxford one of the largest and most highly ranked centres for academic primary care globally. He has also made major contributions to growing primary care academic capacity, in terms of people development and research networks. A highly cited primary care clinical scientist, he has authored over 450 peer reviewed publications, has an h-index of 90, with over 63000 citations (36000 since 2013) and 81 papers cited over 100 times, 14 papers cited over 1000 times and 7 papers with over 2000 citations. He has an outstanding track record in cardiovascular research, delivering trials that changed international guidelines and practice, especially in the areas of stroke prevention in atrial fibrillation (BAFTA, SAFE, and SMART trials), heart failure burden and diagnosis (ECHOES and REFER trials), and hypertension self-management (TASMINH series). He is only the fifth ever recipient of the RCGP Discovery Prize in 2018 (an occasional award made since 1953) and received an inaugural Distinguished Researcher Shine Prize plus Best Presentation Prize at the WONCA World Congress in 2018. He was awarded a CBE for services to medical research in the 2018 New Year’s Honours.

This talk is being held as part of the Big Data Epidemiology course which is part of the Evidence-Based Health Care Programme. This is a free event and members of the public are welcome to attend.

In this talk, Professor Bruno Marchal, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp will illustrate the principles of realist evaluation using the case of the development of a new Tuberculosis control policy in Georgia.

‘Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) is a major public health problem in Georgia. The initial analysis of the policymakers centred around the low levels of treatment adherence and low treatment success rates. In the highly privatised health system, the long treatments TB patients require are not necessarily a priority for private for-profit providers who care for TB patients. The Results4TB research project was launched to inform the process of developing the new policy and to assess it in terms of how it works, its cost, and adherence and treatment success rate. We adopted a theory-informed controlled trial design that includes a cost-effectiveness study and a realist evaluation.
We will focus specifically on the central role of the programme theory, how this theory was developed and how it informed not only the policy, but also the study design.’

This free talk is given in conjunction with the Realist Reviews and Realist Evaluation course, part of the Evidence-Based Healthcare programme.

We are entering the fourth revolution of healthcare.

The first revolution was Public Health with sanitation, cleaner air and better housing. The second is medical healthcare with the advancement of diagnostics and treatment with a focus on disease cure. The third is personalised health, through individual knowledge, technology, behaviour change and precision medicine.

However, these revolutions have left three major problems unresolved; unsustainable healthcare, rising health inequalities and climate change driven by unsustainable living.

So, we enter the fourth revolution in healthcare which builds on the previous three. This is based on communities rather than individuals, supporting a sustainable active lifestyle, eating local produce and using culture, art and contact with nature to create purpose and connections to each other, leading to greater resilience and wellbeing. It is a revolution when Smart Cities become central to the delivery of health and when advanced technology becomes almost invisible encouraging a lifestyle closer rather than further from nature.

In this talk Dr Bird will explain how we are already delivering this future and how biological changes such as chronic inflammation, epigenetics, mitochondrial dysfunction and telomere shortening can provide the scientific link between wellbeing and disease.

Join us for a reception to celebrate Elleke Boehmer’s new short story collection, with a reading of the story, ‘The Biographer and the Wife’, and a discussion of the biographer as a source of creative inspiration with Sophie Ratcliffe and Katherine Collins.

In this book talk, Professor Sonia Contera will talk about how Nanotechnology is transforming medicine and the future of biology.

Please register via the link provided. This book talk will be followed by a drinks reception, book sale and book signing, all welcome.

When the UK joined the EU in 1973 all previous trade barriers with the EU were abolished, which led to a strong intensification of trade with the European continent.

This situation will soon be a thing of the past, however, as new trade barriers will be erected with the withdrawal. Since the food self-sufficiency rate in the UK is particular low newly invoked trade barriers will significantly affect how food is produced and consumed in the UK.

Please register via the link provided.

The regulation of posture is relevant in a health and clinical context – including falls prevention, healthy ageing, and obesity. Balance and therefore postural control involves attentional processes and the application of internal or external attentional foci that have been linked with accuracy and quality of a movement while executing the skill. Measuring balance accurately and deriving meaningful information from it could aid health professionals to develop and design interventions accordingly. Hence, the topic of this talk is around applying new concepts to understand control mechanisms of balance.

Researchers constantly look for ways to improve patient’s health and quality-of-life. Before new treatments or polices are introduced, they need to be tested. Researchers need to make sure they conduct these testing studies carefully. A particular intervention might be effective and improve the quality-of-life for patients, but if the results of the study have not been measured properly, people who make decisions about care may make incorrect decisions.

One particular type of study design is called a stepped-wedge-cluster-randomised-trial (SW-CRT). This is a new study design which is particularly valuable for evaluating changes in the way care is delivered. The new policy is gradually rolled-out so that every group (e.g. hospital) receives the new way of care in the end.
More and more studies are now using the SW-CRT. However, more research needs to be done so we can better understand the study and how it can be used in the best ways to get the best results. In this talk I will explore how and if the SW-CRT can help determine what new healthcare policies bring about improvements in the quality of care and help the NHS identify where resources should be targeted.

Professor Karla Hemming is an internationally renowned expert in stepped-wedge trials and leads a research programme related to stepped wedge trials; this includes both theoretical and applied research.

Blackwell’s is thrilled to be welcoming Jenny Hartley, author of ‘Charles Dickens: A Very Short Introduction’ to explore all elements of one of our most popular authors. Why not make 2020 the year you pick up a Charles Dickens classic!

Synopsis

Charles Dickens is credited with creating some of the world’s best-known fictional characters, and is widely regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian age. Even before reading the works of Dickens many people have met him already in some form or another. His characters have such vitality that they have leapt from his pages to enjoy flourishing lives of their own: The Artful Dodger, Miss Havisham, Scrooge, Fagin, Mr Micawber, and many many more. His portrait has been in our pockets, on our ten-pound notes; he is a national icon, indeed himself a generator of what Englishness signifies.

In this Very Short Introduction Jenny Hartley explores the key themes running through Dickens’s corpus of works, and considers how they reflect his attitudes towards the harsh realities of nineteenth century society and its institutions, such as the workhouses and prisons. Running alonside this is Dickens’s relish of the carnivalesque; if there is a prison in almost every novel, there is also a theatre. She considers Dickens’s multiple lives and careers: as magazine editor for two thirds of his working life, as travel writer and journalist, and his work on behalf of social causes including ragged schools and fallen women. She also shows how his public readings enthralled the readers he wanted to reach but also helped to kill him. Finally, Hartley considers what we mean when we use the term ‘Dickensian’ today, and how Dickens’s enduring legacy marks him out as as a novelist different in kind from others.

All ‘For Learning For Life’ talks are free to attend and everyone is welcome, please register in advance. Talks may be taking place in our Philosophy Department, which is only accessible via a small set of stairs. Seating is limited and will be allocated on a first come, first seated basis, with standing room available. For all enquiries, please email us on events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.

Make 2020 the year when you delve into Crime Fiction with this talk from best-selling author, Sophie Hannah, on her new book, Haven’t They Grown as part of our For Learning, For Life series.

Synopsis:

All Beth has to do is drive her son to his Under-14s away match, watch him play, and bring him home.

Just because she knows that her former best friend lives near the football ground, that doesn’t mean she has to drive past her house and try to catch a glimpse of her. Why would Beth do that, and risk dredging up painful memories? She hasn’t seen Flora Braid for twelve years.

But she can’t resist. She parks outside Flora’s house and watches from across the road as Flora and her children, Thomas and Emily, step out of the car. Except…

There’s something terribly wrong.

Flora looks the same, only older – just as Beth would have expected. It’s the children that are the problem. Twelve years ago, Thomas and Emily Braid were five and three years old. Today, they look precisely as they did then. They are still five and three. They are Thomas and Emily without a doubt – Beth hears Flora call them by their names – but they haven’t changed at all.

They are no taller, no older.

Why haven’t they grown?

Sophie Hannah is an internationally bestselling crime fiction writer, translated into 49 languages and published in 51 countries. Her psychological thriller The Carrier won the Specsavers National Book Award for Crime Thriller of the Year in 2013. Sophie is the author of the bestselling Poirot continuation mysteries. The Point of Rescue and The Other Half Lives have been adapted for television as Case Sensitive, starring Olivia Williams and Darren Boyd. Sophie is also a bestselling poet who has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot award. Her poetry is studied at GCSE and A-level. Sophie is an Honorary Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. She lives in Cambridge with her family.

All For Learning, For Life talks are free to attend and everyone is welcome, please register in advance. Talks may be taking place in our Philosophy Department, which is only accessible via a small set of stairs. Seating is limited and will be allocated on a first come, first seated basis, with standing room available. For all enquiries, please email us on events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.

Systematic reviews are described as the gold standard in the evidence-based healthcare hierarchy. They are supposed to be transparent, reproducible, and follow a set structure. So how can systematic reviews – and within them meta-analyses – that look at the exact same question find radically different answers? The reality, of course, is that meta-analyses are not immune to biases.

This talk will use reviews of electronic cigarettes for smoking cessation as a case study, looking across meta-analyses in this area. Variation in outcomes and conclusions from these reviews will be interrogated, to improve understanding of how different methods shape outcomes, and how different biases shape conclusions.

This free talk is given in conjunction with the Meta-analysis course, part of the Evidence-Based Healthcare programme.

Claire Tomalin was born in 1933 in London to an English mother, the composer Muriel Herbert (linnrecords.com), and a French father. After a somewhat disorganised wartime childhood she studied at Cambridge, married the journalist Nicholas Tomalin, worked in publishing and journalism as literary editor of the New Statesman, then the Sunday Times, while bringing up their children. Nick was killed reporting the Yom Kippur war in 1973. In 1974 she published her first book The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, which won the Whitbread First Book Prize. Since then she has written Shelley and His World 1980; Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life 1987; The Invisible Woman: the story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens 1991 [NCR, Hawthornden, James Tait Black prizes, and a film with Ralph Fiennes, Felicity Jones, Joanna Scanlan, Tom Hollander]; Mrs Jordan’s Profession 1994; Jane Austen: A Life 1997; Samuel Pepys: the Unequalled Self 2002 [Whitbread biography and Book of the Year prizes, Pepys Society Prize, Rose Crawshay Prize]. Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man appeared in 2006, after which she made a television film about Hardy with Melvyn Bragg, and published a selection of Hardy’s poems. Her Charles Dickens: A Life was published in 2011. A collection of her reviews, Several Strangers, appeared in 1999, and a memoir, A Life of My Own, in 2017.
Her books are translated into many languages. She has honorary doctorates from Cambridge, UEA, Birmingham, the Open University, Greenwich, Goldsmith, Roehampton, Portsmouth and York universities.
She has served on the Committee of the London Library and as a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery and the Wordsworth Trust. She is a Vice-President of the Royal Literary Fund, of the Royal Society of Literature and of English PEN.

Discover how art can inflict both harm and harmony in this special live performance of Iris Murdoch’s Art and Eros.

A panel discussion will follow a 45 minute play acted by Oxford Brookes University drama students. With panel members including actress Annette Badland and Murdoch biographer Anne Rowe, we’ll consider what Iris Murdoch’s work says about the meaning of art.

What’s it like to be haunted? Writer Jay Bernard’s augmented reality installation explores this question – unpicking how we can be haunted by our histories and our everyday lives.

Listen to a reading while exploring alternative realities in an AR experience that looks at how the past and present are closely linked.

The installation is based on their debut collection, ‘Surge’, which considered the aftermath of the 1981 New Cross Fire. Jay Bernard is the winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work Poetry and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize.

Part of The Think Human Festival
Everyone welcome

Overdiagnosis is the diagnosis of “disease” that will never cause symptoms or death during a patient’s lifetime.

Recent results of the NELSON Lung Cancer Screening Trial reports reductions in lung-cancer survival but not overall survival – The desire to detect disease even earlier means Overdiagnosis is on the rise, however, the interpretation of screening trial results is problematic and often gives rise to significant uncertainties that go unanswered.

Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine, employs evidence-based methods to research diagnostic reasoning, test accuracy and communicating diagnostic results to a wider audience.

This talk is being held as part of the Evidence-Based Diagnosis & Screening module which is part of the MSc in Evidence-Based Health Care and the MSc in EBHC Medical Statistics. Members of the public are welcome to attend.

Screening of “Streetscapes” (winner of the 2017 German Critics Award) followed by Q&A.
Dr Zohar Rubinstein, clinical and organizational psychologist, specialist in mental health in emergency situations, and one of the founding members of The Interdisciplinary Master Program for Emergency and Disaster Management at the Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University, will be answering questions.

In this book talk, Claas will review central findings of his research on the past 80 years of antibiotic use, resistance, and regulation in food production with introduction by Prof Mark Harrison, Director of Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities.

Mass-introduced after 1945, antibiotics helped revolutionise food production. Farmers and veterinarians used antibiotics to prevent and treat disease, protect plants, preserve food, and promote animals’ growth. Many soon became dependent on routine antibiotic use to sustain and increase production. The resulting growth of antibiotic infrastructures came at a price. Critics blamed antibiotics for leaving dangerous residues in food, enabling bad animal welfare, and selecting for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in bacteria, which could no longer be treated with antibiotics.

Pyrrhic Progress analyses over 80 years of evolving non-human antibiotic use on both sides of the Atlantic and introduces readers to the historical and current complexities of antibiotic stewardship in a time of rising AMR.

This talk includes a drinks reception and nibbles, all welcome

In modern high-tech health care, patients appear to be the stumbling block.

Uninformed, anxious, noncompliant individuals with unhealthy lifestyles who demand treatments advertised by celebrities and insist on unnecessary but expensive diagnostics may eventually turn into plaintiffs. But what about their physicians? About ten years ago, Muir Gray and Gerd Gigerenzer published a book with the subtitle “Envisioning health care 2020”. They listed “seven sins” of health care systems then, one of which was health professionals’ stunning lack of risk literacy. Many were not exactly sure what a false-positive rate was, or what overdiagnosis and survival rates mean, and they were unable to evaluate articles in their own field. As a consequence, the ideals of informed consent and shared decision-making remain a pipedream – both doctors and patients are habitually misled by biased information in health brochures and advertisements. At the same time, the risk literacy problem is one of the few in health care that actually have a known solution. A quick cure is to teach efficient risk communication that fosters transparency as opposed to confusion, both in medical school and in CME. It can be done with 4th graders, so it should work with doctors, too.

Now, in 2020, can every doctor understand health statistics? In this talk, Gerd Gigerenzer will describe the efforts towards this goal, a few successes, but also the steadfast forces that undermine doctors’ ability to understand and act on evidence. Moreover, the last decade has seen two new forces that distract from solving the problem. The first is the promise of digital technology, from diagnostic AI systems to big data analytics, which consumes much of the attention. Digital technology is of little help if doctors do not understand it. Second, our efforts to make patients competent and to encourage them to articulate their values are now in conflict with the new paternalistic view that patients just need to be nudged into better behaviour.

This talk will be followed by a drinks reception, all welcome

Joint event with: The Oxford–Berlin Research Partnership

James Joyce by Richard Ellmann was described by Anthony Burgess as “the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century.” After making a case in support of this claim, I shall tell the story of the book’s creation. Among the topics to be discussed are how and why Ellmann became a biographer; how he chose Joyce as a subject; how he gained the cooperation of the Joyce estate and of Joyce’s family; how he collected Joyce’s papers (a matter of diplomacy, guile, doggedness and luck); how he conducted interviews and chose interviewees; how he placated publishers and thwarted competitors; how he determined the biography’s themes and structure, including the vexed problem of balancing narrative with literary analysis; and how and why he produced a second edition. The aim of the talk will be to offer a behind-the-scenes look at the way literary biographies are made, remind readers how much they can tell us about human behaviour and the creation of works of art, and make clear how gifted a writer and critic Ellmann was.