Читать книгу Pharmageddon - David Healy - Страница 7

Acknowledgments

I have accumulated so many debts it would take an ocean-going liner to accommodate everyone who should be acknowledged. Some of those to whom I am most indebted have been critics, a number of whom over the last decade have held open a forum for debate in which I’ve been able to test and discard ideas. Ocean-going liners have luxuries like showers and bidets. Over the past year I’ve given lectures on the subject matter of this book in several North American settings under the informal title of “The Shower and Bidet Approach to Medical Care,” as well as in Oslo, Uppsala, Bruxelles, Gent, and Milan, and I have Andy Scull, Joel Braslow, Ned Shorter, Cindy Hall, David Antonuccio, Masumi Minaguchi, Tom Ban, and others to thank for this, and much else. Joanna Le Noury, Margaret Harris, Stef Linden, Tony Roberts, and other colleagues in North Wales have helped supply the data for many of these talks.

It takes a lot to divert an ocean-going liner off course. Not so for a carpenter’s boat like George Oppen’s, where staying within the harbor walls seems advisable. There is a much smaller number of people to whom I owe particular debts who might fit on such a boat. These include Charles Medawar, Andrew Herxheimer, Vera Sharav, Annemarie Mol, Steve Lanes, Kal Applbaum, and Dee Mangin, who will see the beams they have contributed here but may feel they have been monstrously welded to the wrong seams, in which case they more than anyone are likely to turn green at the gills once the boat ventures out beyond the harbor mouth.

Far from getting outside the harbor, at one point it looked like the boat would never float, but Jonathan Cobb came to the rescue through wonderful editing. Rather magically he showed me how to write the book I thought I’d written. Bev Slopen, my agent, and Hannah Love, my editor, have also had to keep faith through some tricky moments. And finally Sarah, Helen, and Justin have had to put up with a lot, including “sibling” rivalry.