Randomized controlled trials
Sir, – Evidence-based medicine is such an unfairly named movement that there
can be no sensible argument against it. J. K. Aronson is right (Letters,
February 15) to see it as a front for those who believe some types of
evidence are worth more than others, and correct that I accept the reality
of this hierarchy. He suggests I have been seduced by the importance of the
randomized controlled trial (RCT). That is inaccurate. I have been ravished.
For thousands of years doctors killed rather than helped their patients, the
result of mistaken treatments based on observations, anecdotes and theories.
These forms of evidence can be useful, but they are absolutely and lastingly
inferior when trying “to tell the difference between what works and what
does not”. They are too vulnerable to the pollutions of bias, chance and
misinterpretation, all of which RCTs provide a simple, beautiful and
comparatively reliable way of avoiding. Such trials do not provide us with
evidence that is either perfect or complete, but this is no justification
for suggesting that observation and anecdote are equally good. This is the
perversity of persuading oneself to prefer second-best because it is the
only thing to hand.
Martindale is already beginning to contain references to RCTs, a noticeable
shift from older editions and a sign that the editors, and presumably the
readers, are interested in this sort of information. It undoubtedly will –
and should – swell over the coming years. It is perfectly possible that this
may make it unmanageable in paper form. My original review, as submitted to
the TLS, contrasted Martindale with a book on flower remedies. It was
inspired by the author’s readings of astrology, New Age spirituality and
what she called vibrational healing. She provided both observations and
anecdotes in support of her clinical guidance.
Perhaps the points I made in the review were less clear without that contrast,
and I did approve the proofs of the altered version. Therefore let me finish
with an apology: I did not mean to denigrate these non-RCT forms of evidence
implicitly. I meant to be explicit.
DRUIN BURCH
Horton Hospital, Oxford Road, Banbury.
Roger Morrice
Sir, – Julian Hoppit’s review of The Entring Book of Roger Morrice (1677–1691)
is encouraging (February 15). He rightly notices the absence of an index,
but implies that none was intended. In fact, an index volume, prepared by
Alasdair Hawkyard, will be published later this year. I am glad Professor
Hoppit drew attention to Morrice’s own index, created in the 1690s. It would
have been good to publish this also, especially given the growing scholarly
interest in the organization of knowledge in past time. But, at 60,000 words
on top of the million words of The Entring Book, it was a bridge too far. It
can be read where the manuscript lies, in Dr Williams’s Library in Gordon
Square, London. The decoding of Morrice’s shorthand is owed to Frances
Henderson. Not many people have mastered seventeenth- century shorthands; I
certainly haven’t, but she has. Finally, the edition of the Entring Book is
a collaborative effort and the individual volumes were prepared by Tim
Harris, Mark Knights, John Spurr and Stephen Taylor.
MARK GOLDIE
Churchill College, Cambridge.
Fun out of sex
Sir, – We are grateful to Robert Irwin for acknowledging the high quality of
the entries, the intelligent choice of thematic subjects and the overall
seriousness of the scholarship in The Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature
(February 8). However, we find some of his other observations at the very
least surprising. Mr Irwin contends that we have taken the fun out of sex.
Ironic, then, that he should react so earnestly to the little fellow who
leaps out of candles for the pleasure of lonely Chinese women (Dengcao
Heshang Zhuan’s The Candlewick Monk), and to the many other amusing
novelties to be found in this literature.
That he appears to doubt the very existence of the celebrated modern Haitian
writer René Depestre, the widely anthologized twentieth-century French poet
Pierre Albert-Birot, and the eccentric yet respected essayist Gershon
Legman, is cause for greater concern. There are no made-up entries or
invented authors in our encyclopedia. This is a work of integrity of
purpose, which took six years to complete, the fruit of a sustained
collaboration between hundreds of advisers and contributors from all over
the globe, many of whom, as your reviewer allows, are well-known academics
and writers. As for our failure, in Irwin’s view, to make the coverage
“trashy” enough, the objective was not to help perpetuate a stereotype that
he appears to favour, but to offer new and stimulating readings that would
do justice to the richness and complexity of a genre not reducible to the
so-called pornographic.
GAËTAN BRULOTTE
Department of French, University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Avenue,
Florida 33620.
JOHN PHILLIPS
London Metropolitan University,
166–220 Holloway Road, London N7.
Gregor von Rezzori
Sir, – Jonathan Beckman, in his review of the reissue of Memoirs of an
Anti-Semite (February 8), gives the impression that of the five stories
which make up that novel, Gregor von Rezzori himself translated two from his
native German. Actually it was just the other way round: Rezzori wrote the
pieces in question, “Löwinger’s Rooming House” and “Troth”, in English –
hence their “artlessness” (Beckman) – and only later adapted them for their
first publication in book form (Munich, 1979). Both Rezzori and his
translator, Joachim Neugroschel, took considerable liberties in converting
the literary material from one language into another. Thus, one of the key
sentences singled out by Mr Beckman for comment – “One can’t believe in a
reality that comprises Auschwitz and the Opernball of Vienna at the same
time” – is completely absent from the German version, while its “twin”
(“realities like the Viennese Opernball and Treblinka are incompatible with
what you mean by ‘Truth’”) reads as “Realitäten wie Auschwitz und Treblinka
lassen sich nur schwer vereinen mit dem, was du unter ‘Wirklichkeit’
verstehst” in the original. The rendition of the text prepared for British
and American audiences in 1981, then, is clearly less “commonsensical”, more
frivolous or more daring than the one reserved for the Teutons, and the
comparison allows us to catch another glimpse of the subtleties of this
masterful Austrian writer.
STEPHEN DORNUF
Eppenhauser Strasse 17, D–58093 Hagen, Germany.
Shetlandic
Sir, – J. C.’s very welcome notice of Robert Alan Jamieson’s Nort Atlantik
Drift (NB, February 15) wonders whether this is the first collection of
poems in the Shetland language. In fact there is a tradition of poetry (and
publication) in Shetlandic going back at least as far as James Stout Angus
in the mid-nineteenth century.
Apart from Jamieson himself, whose impressive first collection, Shoormal,
appeared in 1986, Christine de Luca is perhaps the most appreciated of
contemporary poets exploring – or creating – Shetlandic.
The vigorous Shetland sounds that J. C. enjoys in Nort Atlantik Drift have
their roots in the struggles of many northern cultures – Norway, Faeroe, the
Scotland of MacDiarmid and Lewis Grassic Gibbon – to find a voice for
literary expression a century and more ago. The struggle continues, but in
some senses victory is closer than it has ever been: www.shetlopedia.com
lists 200 writers in its Literature section, many of them active now.
DUNCAN MCLEAN
Breckan, Stenness, Orkney.
Segregated South
Sir, – Stephan Thernstrom’s review of Adam Fairclough’s A Class of Their
Own: Black teachers in the segregated South (February 8) states that “all of
the teachers in the South’s Jim Crow schools were black”, a result of white
prejudices and black preferences. He adds that W. E. B. Du Bois denounced
the 1954 decision that, in declaring dual-school systems were unacceptable
even when evenly funded, stopped black children having black teachers by
law.
Decades earlier, in that Deep South city of Charleston, South Carolina, Du
Bois’s one-time pupil, the artist Edwin Harleston, who – at the risk of his
life – established in 1916 a South Carolina branch of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), had spent months
fighting the South Carolina law that insisted that all teachers in coloured
schools had to be white. “Teachers who do not want to be there; teachers who
despise their work”, as Du Bois wrote in the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis
(April 1917). Harleston led a parade of petitioners through Columbia (the
capital of South Carolina) in 1919, which influenced the legislation that
teachers in that state’s black schools after September 1, 1920, had to be
black.
As 1920 was about halfway between the anti-black legislation of the 1890s and
the 1954 Brown v Board of Education, perhaps Fairclough (or your reviewer)
has made an error. Or perhaps Edward Ball’s The Sweet Hell Inside (New York,
2001), the story of the Harlestons, misquotes The Crisis.
JEFFREY GREEN
11 Turret Court, East Grinstead.
‘The Whisperers’
Sir, – Orlando Figes is quite right (Letters, February 15). I mistakenly
attributed Nadezhda Skachkova’s memory to that of Nadezhda Mandelstam, who
appears in The Whisperers on the previous page.
While I, too, caught mistakes in The Whisperers, I preferred in my review to
discuss Figes’s ideas. Figes writes that I “denounced” him, as if we were in
the Soviet Academy of Science in 1937. Rather, I criticized some of his
ideas and praised other qualities of his scholarship. I would have welcomed
in Figes’s letter a defence of his exhumation of the totalitarian thesis,
rather than a defence of his honour.
KATE BROWN
History Department, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore,
Maryland 21253.
Suffrage
Sir, – There is a misattribution in the caption to the photo on page 31 of
your February 15 issue. The group portrayed is described as “Members of the
Anti-Suffrage League” in the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1909. This is in
fact a mixed group of suffragists and anti-suffragists; for example, the
woman on the right of the front row is Helena Swanwick, a prominent member
of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. The photograph was
taken before a debate at the Free Trade Hall bet-ween suffragists and
anti-suffragists, chaired by the Bishop of Manchester, shown at the back of
the group.
DAVID DOUGHAN
Friends of The Women’s Library, 120 Kenley Road, London SW19.
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