Thursday, 31 December 2020

Nothing conserves like poverty

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Sometimes neglect is good. In the city the rich folks live on the hill. In the country it's the poor folk. The big beef farmers and the ...
Sunday, 20 December 2020

Americans would eventually get to share most of the advantages of Britain’s forced opening of China’s ports without any of the violence

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As for the American traders at Canton, in some ways they were the war’s greatest beneficiaries, for they would eventually get t...
Saturday, 19 December 2020

As much as one-tenth of Britain’s national revenue derived from the trade at Canton

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The [East India] Company’s income from the China trade was completely swamping its revenues from India: in the first decade of ...
Friday, 18 December 2020

You may not want to spend too many years of your life here, but as you see it in the early 1830s, Canton hardly seems the kind of place to start a war.

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The entire formal trade of Europe and America with China, the largest empire in existence, goes on here in a space of just twelve acres — le...
Saturday, 5 December 2020

But when medicine inures you to the idea of life, to survival, then it has failed utterly

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To me, these were miracles enough. It is an old complaint about the practice of medicine that it inures you to the idea of death. But when m...
Friday, 4 December 2020

In God we trust. All others must have data.

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“The clinician, no matter how venerable, must accept the fact that experience, voluminous as it might be, cannot be employed as a sensitive ...
Thursday, 3 December 2020

New drugs appeared at an astonishing rate

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New drugs appeared at an astonishing rate: by 1950, more than half the medicines in common medical use had been unknown merely a decade earl...