Mark Andrews: Was Shakespeare an early advocate of social distancing?
In the Royal Society of Medicine's latest journal, there is a paper by palliative care expert Dr David Jeffery who suggests medics should be trained to put patients at ease by reciting Shakespeare at them.
Dr Jeffrey suggests that if doctors were more familiar with the Bard's words, they might come across as more empathetic when dealing with people at their most vulnerable.
“Shakespeare speaks through times of crisis, underlining the centrality of empathic human relationships," says the doctor.
"Medical humanities are often on the fringes of medical education but should be central to medicine culture change. A special study module would be one way of introducing Shakespeare studies to the undergraduate curriculum.”
Then I noticed that the paper had been published on April 1. Was this an April Fool? Do our learned experts really get their laughs by writing spoof reports about end-of-life care in medical journals, or was the date just a coincidence?
The answer is I'm still not entirely sure. The report is still on the journal's website with no explanation of how we've all been had, and its contents are still being reported on in tones of the utmost gravity all over the world. But it comes to something when you can't actually tell whether medical research is a joke or not.
