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September is here, and the mists and mellow fruitfulness have arrived as promptly as John Keats could have wished. His medical career peaked 210 years ago. He was working as a surgical dresser at Guy’s hospital, a coveted junior post, and in July 1816 passed the examinations qualifying him as an apothecary, a role then beginning to be called by its new name of ‘general practitioner’.
The annual European Society of Cardiology meeting finished in Munich last weekend. A new ‘superhuman’ AI tool capable of spotting heart disease in less than two seconds was presented there. This is exciting, but Keats would have been sceptical – and dubious about the business of medical breakthroughs. He lived long enough to experience the greatest diagnostic advance of his age – the stethoscope – which proved of no use in saving his life.
The ECG, the recording of the heart’s electrical activity, is a familiar part of our lives. Film and TV adore its regular spikes, and in the hospitals we share the same blind devotion. On my more acute wards every patient is wired up, the monitor next to them showing their ECG in real-time.
Restraint matters. Information is not care
