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Desmond O’Neill on the power of cinema in discussing medical humanities
One of the pleasures of academic medicine, and a salve for the gentle disorganisation of Irish medical schools, is the initiative, enthusiasm, and broad ranging interests of the medical students and...
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Desmond O’Neill: Combatting rigidity in medicine
High quality films for children have a special place in our cultural landscape, an appeal which even embraces the medical humanities. To reach beyond children to the adults in their entourage requires...
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Desmond O’Neill: Expanding the imaginarium of ageing
My most formative experience in gerontology was a student gap year in Marseille. A volunteer with Les Petits Frères des Pauvres, a charmingly radical organisation dedicated to improving life for older...
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Desmond O’Neill: Some illuminations on caring for older people
Gothenburg is a handsome city with imposing stone and brick buildings, simultaneously sober and ornamented, set among green hills falling to not one but two archipelagos. It was particularly striking...
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Desmond O’Neill: Blinded by science
The newest architectural gem in Trinity College Dublin is the award winning Long Room Hub, a slim and elegant presence inserted among classical, neoclassical, and modern buildings. Just as its many...
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Desmond O’Neill: Elective Dreams
With every elective student that joins our unit, I get a vivid flashback of my own electives. No matter how much water has flowed under the bridge since then, something particularly special endures...
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Desmond O’Neill: Stethophones and barriers to effective care of older people
There is a long tradition in medicine of accepting a degree of mismatch between labels and the functions that they address. A classic example is the stethoscope, through which few of us peer, but which...
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Desmond O’Neill: Ageing, astronauts, and organists in Rotterdam
“Le frime” is an almost untranslatable French word for doing something that seems superfluous for the fun of it. It is as good a term as any for the opening ceremonies of our European Union Geriatric...
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Desmond O’Neill: Sky disc and the marvel of ageing
One of the great challenges of hospital medicine is retaining a sense of the marvel of ageing after a busy night on general take. The sheer complexity of the frail, multimorbid, and delirious...
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Desmond O’Neill: A gerontological fear of missing out
Faced with a gerontology conference with 30 parallel sessions over five days, the texting argot of teenagers comes in handy. To LOL and YOLO has been added FOMO: Fear of Missing Out! Effective FOMO...
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Desmond O’Neill: Older drivers and medical fitness to drive
Does life really imitate art, or is it the other way round? Listening to an exhilarating live performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra of Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, the droll tone poem about a...
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Des O’Neill: Flights of Imagination—Birdman and Still Alice
Birdman, one of the most riotously entertaining yet serious movies of the last decade, deservedly won a clutch of Oscars. Dealing with ageing, the fear of irrelevance, and the nature of art, it wore...
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Desmond O’Neill: The success and opportunities arising from population ageing
There is an extra uplift from spring conferences which mirrors the freshness of the season. My own traverse started in Vienna with a reflection on how the hegemony of the English language impoverishes...
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Desmond O’Neill: Surprised by beauty
Like most doctors, my conference schedule is usually mapped out well in advance, anticipating the complex leave requirements of trainees and colleagues in an ever busier department of geriatric and...
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Desmond O’Neill: Wheelbarrows, transport, and health
There is an old joke about a man who goes through a customs post with a wheelbarrow of sand every day. The increasingly frustrated customs officers make intensive searches of the contents, but never...
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Desmond O’Neill: 45 years of solitude
One of the rare pleasures of life is to encounter a movie without the encrustation of prior critical approval, hype, or derision. One of my stand-out cinematic experiences occurred at a very busy stage...
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Desmond O’Neill: Nordic insights into the art of ageing and dying well
I hate to miss the opening ceremonies of European geriatric medicine conferences, with the individual interplay between this most complex of medical specialties with the national characteristics of the...
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Desmond O’Neill: Welcoming the new ageing in a global context
Expenditure in older populations is an investment, not a cost, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) With relatively little fanfare, the World Report on Ageing and Health—one of the most...
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Desmond O’Neill: The Healing Touch
Although not as grand as the Museum Quarter of Hapsburg Vienna, Dublin has a proportionately rich concentration of museums, galleries, and Victorian heritage alongside Trinity College Dublin, our own...
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Desmond O’Neill on Star Wars: The Force Awakens—and matures
Exams and the pre Christmas rush notwithstanding, a triple-line party whip was in force within the family for the midnight first screening of Star Wars, The Force Awakens. Sitting in the back row of a...
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