Background Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada came into effect in 2016 with the passing of Bill C-14. As patient interest and requests for MAID continue to evolve in Canada, it is important to understand the attitudes of future providers and the factors that may influence their participation. Attitudes towards physician hastened death in general and the specific provision of MAID are unknown among Canadian residents. This study examined residents’ attitudes towards PHD and MAID, and identified factors that may influence (...) their decision to participate in PHD and provide MAID. Methods A cross-sectional survey was adapted from prior established surveys on MAID to reflect the Canadian setting. All Canadian family medicine programs were invited to participate. The survey was distributed between December 2016 and April 2017. Analysis of the results included descriptive statistics to characterize the survey participants and multivariable logistic regressions to identify factors that may influence residents’ attitudes towards PHD and MAID. Results Overall, 247 residents from 6 family medicine training programs in Canada participated. While residents were most willing to participate in treatment withdrawal, active participation in PHD and MAID by prescription of a lethal drug and lethal injection were less acceptable. Logistic regressions identified religion as a consistent and significant factor impacting residents’ willingness to participate in PHD and MAID. Residents who were not strictly practicing a religion were more likely to be willing to participate in PHD and MAID. Increased clinical exposure to death and dying crudely correlated with increased willingness to participate in PHD and MAID, but when examined in multivariable models, only a few activities had a statistically significant association. Other significant factors included the residents’ sex and location of training. Conclusions Residents are hesitant to provide MAID themselves, with religious faith being a major factor impacting their decision. (shrink)

It is now generally agreed that in Aristotle's Poetics, ch. 13 means ‘mistake of fact’. The moralizing interpretation favoured by our Victorian forebears and their continental counterparts was one of the many misunderstandings fostered by their moralistic society, and in our own enlightened erais revealed as an aberration. In challenging this orthodoxy I am not moved by any particular enthusiasm for Victoriana, nor do I want to revive the view that means simply ‘moral flaw’ or ‘morally wrong action’. I shall (...) try to show that the word has a range of applications, from ‘ignorance of fact’ at one end to ‘moral defect’, ‘moral error’, at the other, and that the modern orthodoxy, though not as clearly wrong as the moralizing interpretation it displaced, restricts Aristotle's meaning in a way he did not intend, and does lessthan justice to his analysis of classical drama. (shrink)

So Pearson. The strange series of hypodochmiacs here and atO.T.1207 ff., with brevis in longo without pause atAj.421 andO.T.1208, seems metrically self-contained, despite their syntactical interdependence (esp.Aj.421–2οὐκέτ' ἄνδρα μὴ | τόνδ' ἴδητ', so that the word-overlap ofοἷονinto iambics in Pearson's text is unlikely.ἑξερῶ μέγαshould therefore be writtenplena scriptura. Thenοἷον οὔτιν' ἁ Τροί|α στρατοῦ…is possible, but the ithyphallic with word-overlap, sometimes found in the syncopated iambics of Aeschylus, is foreign to Sophocles. Divideἐξερῶ μέγα, | οἷον οὔτινα | Τροία…Thenϕίλοι τοῖσδ' ὁμοῦ = (...) οἷον οὔτινα, i.e.δ= hyp., which is not certainly found, and the antistrophe has two syllables extra. (shrink)

In her masterly article on this passge, Dr. Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood goes most of the way towards solving two serious problems: the text of Lys. 645, where the vulgate makes the ‘bears’ more than ten years old, contrary to all other evidence; and the meaning of of A. Ag. 239 . She argues cogently that in Aeschylus means ‘shedding’ the saffron robe, as most editors including Fraenkel have thought, and not ‘letting her robes fall to the ground’ as Lloyd-Jones, followed by (...) Page, has argued. (shrink)

The publish-or-perish paradigm is a prevailing facet of science. We apply game theory to show that, under rather weak assumptions, this publication scenario takes the form of a prisoner’s dilemma, which constitutes a substantial obstacle to beneficial delayed publication of more complete results. One way of avoiding this obstacle while allowing researchers to establish priority of discoveries would be an updated “pli cacheté”, a sealed envelope concept from the 1700s. We describe institutional rules that could additionally favour high-quality work and (...) publications and provide examples of such policies that are already in place. Our analysis should be extended to other publication scenarios and the role of other stakeholders such as scientific journals or sponsors. (shrink)

It has long been accepted as a principle by editors and writers on Greek metre that brevis in longo and hiatus in tragic lyrics often coincide with some kind of sense-pause. The object of this inquiry is to determine the incidence of pause in such places, and show that it is significantly high; to show that there is a comparable incidence in the corresponding places in strophic systems; to show that period-ends determined by criteria other than brevis and hiatus are (...) attended by similar conditions. It might seem that if all this were true it would have been recognized long ago, particularly as the connection between sense and metrical structure, and symmetry of sense in strophe and antistrophe, has often been pointed out. (shrink)

Orestes has revealed himself to Electra and sworn with her to avenge Agamemnon. He outlines his plan and leaves the stage with a prayer to his father, after warning the chorus against indiscretion . They begin: Earth nurtures many dread hurts and fears; the sea's embrace is full of monsters hostile to man; lights in mid-air between earth and heaven also harm winged things and things that tread the earth; and one might also tell of the stormy wrath of tempests. (...) But who could tell of a man's unruly will, and of ruthless woman's unbridled passions, that share her heart with evil powers ruinous to mankind?3 But surpassing all is the wicked female passion whereby wedded union is worsted, among beasts and men alike. (shrink)

This line, composed of only three words, occurs near the beginning of a speech in which Orestes, having revealed himself to his sister, is passing on to her and toa sympathetic chorus consisting of slaves in the royal palace at Argos, the gist of the instructions Apollo, through his oracle at Delphi, has given him about avenging his murdered father. The God, less merciful than the ghost of King Hamlet, has ordered him to kill his mother as well as her (...) paramour. (shrink)

There was once a man in a certain village in the mountains, who made his living by making up stories, which he used to tell to the people of his village to while away their evenings. One day he went on a journey to a strange village far away in the plains, and there he saw a group of men sitting round another story-teller. Being curious to learn whether his rival was as good a story-teller as he was, he joined (...) the group and listened. He was astonished to find that the story being told was one he had made up himself. So when the story-teller had finished, the man took him aside and said, ‘That was a good story, but it is my story, which I made up, and you must pay me money for it.’ ‘You are wrong,’ said his rival. ‘It is my story, for I made it up myself this morning’. (shrink)

In CQ 55 , 22–5, E. Harrison noticed that hiatus between verses in the trimeters of dialogue was much less frequent in tragedy when the sense ran on from one verse to the next, than when there was a pause in sense at verse-end. He observed that Aeschylus' Prometheus differed from the other plays of Aeschylus in this respect, the proportion of run-over hiatus to end-stopped hiatus being much higher, and more like that of comedy; that Sophocles had remarkably few (...) verses with run-over hiatus in the Trachiniae and Antigone , much less than Aeschylus in proportion to the number of non-stop trimeters in the play, though Oedipus Tyrannus had much the largest number in Sophocles , and no continuous chronological development was discernible; that in Euripides there was a general progression from relative strictness to relative freedom in the run-over hiatus allowed, though individual plays did not conform closely to this pattern; that in general comedy was freer than tragedy. (shrink)

This paper argues that, for Richard Titmuss, the rationale of the gift relationship (TGR) as a national blood policy is to reconcile liberty with social justice in the provision of an essential health resource. Underpinned by a needs-based distributive principle, TGR provides a social space for a plurality of values in which to engage with and motivate people to voluntarily give blood and other body materials as a common good. This understanding of TGR as a value pluralistic framework and its (...) implications will be used to discuss the issue of using economic mechanisms to increase the supply of body materials or goods, including organs for transplantation. It is argued that, while TGR excludes a policy in which body goods are treated as private commodities and distributed primarily on the basis of achieving market efficiency, it is not in principle opposed to the use of material rewards, including financial ones, to motivate people to donate. (shrink)

Some years ago, Sir Kenneth Dover suggested a new interpretation of καρξαι. Prima facie, the chorus ask the sun to proclaim where Heracles is, and this sense is supported by such passages as Il. 3.277 Ήλιóς θ', ς πντ' ορς, Od. 9.109 Ήελου, ς πντ' ορ , Od. 8.270–1 αρ δ ο γγελος λθεν | Ήλιος, and especially h. Cer. 69ff., where ‘Demeter visits the Sun and implores him, “you who look down on all earth and sea…tell me truly of (...) my dear child, if you have seen her anywhere, who has gone off with her…”.’ This is the way καρξαι in Trach. 97 has always been taken. Dover points out, however, that κηρττειν also has a special, technical sense: to make proclamation inquiring about a missing person's whereabouts, as the town-crier used to do a century ago England and elsewhere, and the media do now. The model is not that of h. Cer. 69ff., but rather S. Aj. 845ff.: ‘Sun, when you see my native land, draw near and tell my aged father…of my fate.’ The examples he cites are enough to demonstrate the ‘interrogative’ use of κηρττω, though his first example, Ar. Ach. 748 γν δ καρυξ Δικαιóπολιν π, will not do: if sound, it means not ‘I will find out by κρυξ where Dicaeopolis is’ , but ‘I will summon Dicaeopolis to where ’. The normal ‘interrogative’ use is to enquire by herald the whereabouts of a Crminal or a runaway slave. (shrink)

If our theology about the human condition correctly underscores our brokenness, and our understanding of the world as being fallen indeed reflects reality, then our poetry of worship should express that brokenness as well as our longing for healing. However, the Church in North America neglects laments because we have essentially lost the art and practice of grieving in the West, the Church silently condones some bad theology about Christian living, and we lack a robust philosophy of language in Christian (...) practices and disciplines. As this article explores, Job's curse and the lament of Psalm 22 offer healthy correctives to these and other missteps. The article emphasizes the important place of lament in Christian community, particularly as it functions in worship. (shrink)