Latest news with #ThomasGray
BBC News
14-05-2025
- General
- BBC News
Keswick park linked to 'first' environment protest turns 100
A park believed to have sparked the first written environmental protest in England is celebrating 100 years since it was donated to the Park in Keswick was given to the National Trust by owners Sir John and Lady Randles "to look after on behalf of the nation" in 1925.A plaque designating the Lake District as a UNESCO World Heritage Site was placed there in park had been covered in oak woodland until the mid 1700s, when the then owners felled the trees to raise income for the Greenwich Hospital for injured soldiers, sparking objections from locals. They included a mention from poet Thomas Gray in 1769 in his Journal of A Visit to the Lake said: "I walked to Crow Park, now a rough pasture, once a glade of ancient oaks, whose large roots still remain on the ground, but nothing has sprung from them. "If one single tree had remained this would have been an unparalleled spot." Anniversary event The National Trust believed this to be the first written record of an environmental protest and a key moment in the development of the Picturesque movement saw poets such as William Wordsworth and John Ruskin take part in the debate around public access to open spaces, which inspired Cumbrian vicar Hardwicke Rawnsley to co-found of the National mark the 100-year milestone of Crow Park being donated to the charity, they are holding a two-day event, with acrobatic performances on 16.4ft (5m) swings and a chance for people to try Binns, Senior Programming and Partnerships Officer at the National Trust said: "With its historical significance and easy access to an iconic Lake District view, we are proud to continue to care for this special place while improving access so that everyone can enjoy nature, beauty and history here for generations." Follow BBC Cumbria on X, Facebook, Nextdoor and Instagram.
New York Times
13-03-2025
- Health
- New York Times
Sick or Neurotic? This Writer Will Be the Judge.
• As a cultural attitude, 'ignorance is bliss' has sort of fallen out of favor. Much more de rigueur: 'Do the work,' 'the only way out is through,' 'see something say something.' Never mind that Thomas Gray's 18th-century adage happens to be true, and, in the case of the inner machinations of our own physical bodies, ethically uncompromising. We are a society of hypochondriacs, a band of idiots roving through TikTok and Reddit and Apple Watch data and WebMD for the pseudoscientific meanings of our symptoms, the diagnoses of our own mortality. But as any armchair therapist will tell you, the high of control is short-lived. No sooner do we digest another physiological factoid than the hunger comes back tenfold, in the form of even more questions than we had before. This rabbit hole is explored in stylish detail by the English book editor and academic Will Rees in 'Hypochondria,' a compact treatise that spirals through memoir, history and theory in an effort to grab hold of its slippery subject. Rees doesn't, of course, but that failure only redirects him. Hypochondria, he writes, 'is a diagnosis that puts into question how certain we can ever be about any diagnosis,' itself included. 'Call it what you will, it's the uncertainty that interests me, not the labels with which we try to contain it.' Rees knows the hypochondriac's plight firsthand. 'One day in 2010,' he writes ominously, 'I got a headache.' A normal one; not excruciating — but lingering. After a month, a doctor tells him that Rees, like so many undergraduates, is experiencing tension headaches. Rees refuses painkillers — the idea 'struck me as irresponsible, even reckless, like disconnecting a fire alarm because it has interrupted your sleep' — preferring a Kafka-inspired campaign 'to understand the headache' instead. Good luck with that, the reader mutters as our author innocently ambles down the path of hypochondriacal no-return, his newly observed symptoms accumulating like a ball of rubber bands. He forgets words and where he's seen certain faces before, his eye sometimes twitches and coffee tastes metallic and he notices himself hiccupping one to three times per day. ('Can hiccups be caused by brain cancer? I asked Google. Yes, it answered — if it is advanced.') Doctors fail to find anything wrong. Here Rees's writing is at its most acute: in articulating the myopia that has plagued the human brain since its development — particularly those of people with too much time for idle thinking. This slim book offers no shortage of drama. In addition to his own trials, Rees refers us to Robert Burton's 1621 'Anatomy of Melancholy' and its cataloging of hypochondriacs who believed their bodies had transmuted into stoneware or glass, as well as the gory dethroning of Hippocrates' humoral theory of medicine in the 1540s. In 2013, Rees writes, smack in the middle of his own five-year bout, 'hypochondria ceased to exist'; the term had been removed from the D.S.M.-5. Rees originally set out to write 'a serious, scholarly study' of the condition 'that would diligently chart its development' from ancient Greece to the present. This book is not that one, but something perhaps more interesting, even useful: one mind's effort to reconcile its impressions of the world, however distorted, with those of a long lineage of thinkers before him, in the process metastasizing a non-theory of hypochondria into a more universal thesis about the enduring power of human doubt. Rees points out the double confusion of hypochondria — that the term itself has ever been, medically speaking, 'suspended in darkness,' as Freud put it in 1909. For Rees, this also applies to the sufferer. 'I can think of no better way to describe the lightless place in which hypochondriacs find themselves, their desire for some definite and illuminating understanding that pushes them to grasp, anxiously, at the very limits of their knowledge.' Rees starts to feel better and moves on with his life, which mostly involves writing about illness and its absence. But timelines, in this book, overlap atemporally, as they do in our own minds. One chapter, originally published as a magazine essay, recounts two weeks of tests Rees underwent following a fever and a possible lymph node spotted on a chest X-ray. This period of biopsies, waiting rooms and medical reports, he writes, left him with a hospital discharge but no certainty that he was, indeed, healthy. An unexpected addendum mimics the rug-pulling disorientation of the hypochondriac's self-doubt. A year after the essay publishes, a stranger approaches Rees at an event. 'You need to get another test,' the man says. Upon reading the essay, the stranger says, he had but one thought: 'This person has lymphoma.' And with that, the reader feels the lights go out on our own smug illusions of certainty. We don't know the results of his ensuing M.R.I. 'Now, I prefer not to know.'writes Rees. There is no satisfying resolution, for him or for us. The story of our health does not end decisively — until it does.
