Emotional among friends

doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7421.0-g

BMJ 2003;327 (25 October), doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7421.0-g

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Emotional among friends

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

"What our age lacks," wrote Soren Kierkegaard, "is not reflectionbut passion." The staple of medical journals is reason. We clingto the fiction of the enlightenment and are nervous of passion.But we know that it is passion that drives the world, and medicine—dealingdaily with birth, sickness, pain, and death—might be themost emotional of all the intellectual disciplines. Usuallyit isn't, but this issue contains much emotion.

Zulfiqar Bhutta, Samiran Nundy, and Kamran Abbasi are launchingthe BMJ into something very special—a theme issue on thehealth problems of South Asia edited by South Asians (p 941)."South Asia," wrote a former Pakistani minister of finance,"is fast emerging as the poorest, the most illiterate, the mostmalnourished... the most deprived region in the world." Almost40% of deaths in children under 5 years occur in its four largestcountries. Yet it invests more in . . . [Full text of this article]

Richard Smith, editor

(rsmith@bmj.com)

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