Instant wisdom

This is the first paragraph of a lecture I gave to the Cardiff Medical Society on “Decision making in the glare of publicity.” An abridged version was published in The Scientific Proceedings of the Cardiff Medical Society on 8 January 1974.

“When I was a student at University College Hospital, London, I was deeply impressed by a story which Thomas Lewis recounted of his early years in London before the first world war. As a young man he was invited to dinner one evening by Sir James Mackenzie, the …