All medical journals these days feel the compulsion to be high-minded, but none is as high-minded as the Lancet. It is as if the editors had taken lessons both in moral philosophy and rhetoric from Mr. Pecksniff himself.
Mr. Pecksniff, you may remember, was the preposterous hypocrite in Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit, who introduces his daughters, Charity and Mercy, by adding “Not unholy names, I hope?” As Know thyself was inscribed over the entrance to the temple to Apollo at Delphi, and Abandon hope, all ye who enter here over the entrance to Dante’s hell, so Mr Pecksniff’s words, Let us be moral, must be inscribed over the entrance to the offices of the Lancet, figuratively if not literally
In the week before a Malaysian Airlines plane, taking many AIDS doctors and activists from Amsterdam to Melbourne for an international conference on AIDS, was shot down over eastern Ukraine, the Lancet published a statement called the Declaration of Melbourne, a typically sickly and nauseatingly unctuous statement of ethical principles. It began by saying something that, if not a lie exactly, was certainly not a truth:
We gather in Melbourne, the traditional meeting place of the Wurundjeri, Boonerwrung, Taungurong, Djajawurrung and the Wathaurung people, the original and enduring custodians of the lands that make up the Kulin Nation, to assess progress on the global HIV response and its future direction, at the 20th International AIDS Conference, AIDS 2014.
This, of course, is the purest 21st century Pecksniffery; and unless the signers of the declaration (who look extremely self-congratulatory in photos accompanying the article) can each and severally explain in what sense the Djajawarrung are the custodians of the lands on which the city of Melbourne is built, I suggest that they be banished to the outback for five years to live as pre-contact Australian Aborigines lived.