Richard Smith: Obituario...

No, no hay por que alarmarse. No se ha muerto. Tan solo es:

"This is my obituary written 10 years ago--x years before my death."

y que publica en su perfil de Facebook.

Este es el texto:

Who the hell is Richard Smith?

One thing I’ve discovered through editing the BMJ is that all doctors are saints. At least they are when dead. Doctors’ obituaries are tales of one triumph after another. The doctors you meet may be incompetent, egocentric, selfish, pompous, and drunk, but they are cleansed of these faults by the time they die. As an editor, this infuriates me. I’m interested in real people, not the seraphs (six winged celestial creatures, in case you don’t know) who adorn our obituary pages. But all my attempts to “get real” in the obituary pages have failed. I’m fighting a whole culture.
So the least I can do when asked by the editor of Chariot to write about myself (what a treat for a self publicist) is to give you some warts. Indeed, I will give you an obituary of myself that I drafted as part of my lost campaign to transform obituaries. It was, of course, a cheat. Because the first thing you should know about me is that I’m not dead. (Well, not as I type this.)

Richard Smith thought he was different, but he wasn’t. In common with a surprisingly large number of the members of the medical establishment, he thought he was a maverick. He saw himself as a radical trapped in the body of the editor of the BMJ, one of the world’s dullest medical journals. The first thing that struck you when you met Smith was that he dressed badly, used a blunt razer to shave, and probably had a blind hairdresser. His accent was “gorblimey,” an embarrassingly thin educated veneer over straight, guttural cockney. And after a few drinks the veneer was gone. He talked too fast, ate too fast (splashing it over his bad clothes), and generally acted first and thought second. His tactlessness was legendary, and he was regularly in trouble over half-baked editorials that should have been ignored but somehow touched raw nerves.
He took the BMJ, a fine clinical journal, and turned it into a tabloid rag full of epidemiology, social bleating, debased sciences like economics, and qualitative research. Shortly before he died he went completely off the rails and became obsessed with oxymorons like peer review research and electronic publishing. He took the BMJ down an obscure creek called the Internet and thankfully it never returned. His last act was to become a visiting professor (so, finally, draining the last drop of value from that term) at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. There he held writing clinics, taught on being a reviewer and how to get published, encouraged research into peer review, advised on authorship, and gave a dreary lecture on meeting the information needs of health workers in the developing world. He died of overexposure and leaves a large collection of jazz records and malt whisky.

Desde hace tiempo lo "tengo" en mis clases y presentaciones:


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Slides: Fernando Comas/Curso de Postgrado Mercadeo/ Facultad Farmacia Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV)