Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal,

and I'm very pleased to welcome on the show today, Anthony Daniels, known to our readers by his

pen name Theodore Dalryple, a retired physician who once practiced in a British inner city

hospital in prison. Tony is one of the English-speaking world's great writers, most original writers.

He was once described by Arts and Letters Daily as the Orwell of Our Time,

and Peggy Noonan calls him the best doctor writer since William Carlos Williams.

His work has appeared not only in City Journal, but in multiple publications,

ranging from the Wall Street Journal to the new criterion to National

Review. He is the author of at least two dozen books, one of which we will discuss today.

Tony's here in New York, and we're happy to have him on 10 blocks. We'll take a quick break,

and we'll be back with Theodore Dalrymple after the music.

Hello again, everyone. This is Brian Anderson, editor of City Journal.

Joining us in the studio is Anthony Daniels, better known to our readers,

as Theodore Dalrymple. We gave a longer introduction at the start of the show, but he's written nearly 500 articles short and long for us since 1994, and it's an honor to finally have him on the

podcast. Tony, your new book looks at the fields of medicine and

health through the lens of the New England Journal of Medicine. The book is called False Positive,

a year of error, omission, and political correctness in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Perhaps he could describe what led you to write this book and how you proceeded.

Well, I started, I was inspired, if that's the word, to write it by a request from my French

nephew, who was a medical student in Paris, who had an exam on how to read medical papers, medical literature, medical journals.

And I gave him a few rules of thumb, and he passed the exam.

And I thought, well, I would look at the journal follow it care

...