Every Man His Own Osler

  
Here are three venerable (est. 1823, 1869, and 1956, respectively) UK weeklies of worldwide influence that, though demanding of their largely clinical subscribers in each instance $200 or so for a print subscription, nonetheless also provide as a public service enough free content in the way of summarized scientific and medical news, blogs, e-mail alerts of weekly content and breaking news, book reviews, and other features to make them very much worth an hour or two each week of ... triaged ... serial perusal by lay readers, especially those of us who, for (mental) health reasons as it were, have eliminated from our media diets all topical essays in politics, economics and finance* in favor of much more wholesome and fortifying and lasting fare to be had elsewhere, where browse the cool kids, the truly called and chosen spirits of our world - not excepting, as well, those still, alas, largely unread literary and philosophical classics from centuries past to be had for a quarter a pop at your local Armed Forces of Salvation, Goodwill ambassadors, and, in the end and not least, on Bag Day at your local Friends of the Library book sale: "Plato the Greek or Rin Tin Tin - who's more famous to the billion million?"

Speaking of book bargains, I see that my book pick for the month, Great Discoveries in Medicine, is selling for as low as $11.95, or almost 75% off the list price, only six months or so since publication. It's exceptionally well-designed and lushly illustrated, and along with the late Roy Porter, the Bynums are the gold - or should I say crimson? - standard among UK historians of medicine.

Here is suitable background music by which to read The Lancet, especially its dispatches from the oscillating front lines of cardiology.

*As of recent weeks I no longer even bother checking, e.g., The Atlantic, Harper's, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times and its Book Review, or The New Yorker - save for the latter's cartoons, of course - and even allowed my TLS subscription to lapse (though they still send it over three months after expiration, with renewed January 2013 expiry date and all, while cutting me off however from the Subscriber Archive, through which, rather than through my print copies, I used to do almost all my reading of the paper; Update 5/5: problem solved thanks to live chat with Times customer service), though I still find checking its online Contents page each Wednesday (for the issue dated Friday), and then following up the more tempting leads therein via Google, an indispensable habit: it's WMD - What Mencken Did, after all, if minus "the" Google, as he told Edmund Wilson:

The new Mencken letters 

books.google.comHenry Louis Mencken, Carl Bode - 1977 - 635 pages - Snippet view ... the London Times Literary Supplement every week, and have been doing so for many years. l order books on its recommendation, for l have learned by long experience that its reviewers really know the subjects they are discussing. More editions

Speaking of Wilson and the New York Review of Books, here is his 1963 self-interview from the paper's second issue, "Every Man His Own Eckermann", which Gore Vidal took as his model in "Every Eckermann His Own Man", an essay in the paper's 25th anniversary number from the fall of 1988 springboarding off a subscription-promo anthology of pieces from the paper's first two star-studded issues. Though since his own self-interview did not run live on ABC Vidal neither called himself a "queer" nor threatened to "sock [himself in his own] god-damn face", such that he would "stay plastered", he did on the other unfisted hand at numerous points in his later navigation of his leisure hours Goethe're in undertaking many an Italian journey, to the point of setting up housekeeping there, perhaps even further extending his parallels with the sage of Weimar, gender-reassigned to suit, in having taken his housekeeper as his mister - if not his (Wilhelm) Meister, both his Lehrjahre** and his Wanderjahre having passed during a wartime service in which, in spite of our ostensible goose-stepping foes, nothing at all German(e) to this blog post took place, as Vidal was posted to the Aleutians, where he was among those of Uncle Sam's shipboard privates to hear their First Mating call.

**And speaking of wanderings in the Eternal City, in my threatened C21 sequel Goethe'r Dun!, the Memoirs of Lehrjahre der Kable Guy, the reader learns that roman wasn't bildung a day. And I don't care who you are, that's not funny right there because it's German and does not involve John Cleese.

And if the sales of that justify it, I'm thinking, much like Vidal perhaps if not as a scriptwriter then, of ... doing a pilot ... under the working title The Wander Jahres, unless Fred Savage is either unavailable or unwilling to play with a German accent. Then after he's played with it, he can use it in earnest - or in Gilbert, or in any other character in an Oscar Wilde critical dialogue.