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Emergency Medicine: The State of the Art

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 June 2012

William H. Rutherford
Affiliation:
Accident and Emergency Department, Royal Victoria Hospital Belfast Ireland.

Extract

Coming from the city in the world which has made the least political progress in the past decade, I hope you will excuse me for starting with a distinction often made in Northern Ireland, and for all I know in other places in relation to the sphere of political activity. We say that such and such a matter is politics with a small p, and such and such is politics with a large P. Let me give you two examples. If I were to say that the contribution of nurses to disaster medicine is ten times as important as the contribution of paramedics, this would not only demonstrate that my death wish is alive and well, it would also be an example of politics with a small p. On the other hand if I were to say that Maggie Thatcher is destroying the National Health Service and somehow we must persuade all non Conservative parties to form a single coalition to get rid of her, that would be an example of politics with a very big P. If you wish to understand the entire scope of political activity, then it is very important that you recognize both politics with a small p and politics with a large P. Politics with a large P is really a subset of politics with a small p, which in its broadest sense embraces the totality of the subject.

Type
Selected papers from the 4th World Congress on Emergency and Disaster Medicine, Brighton, United Kingdom, June, 1985
Copyright
Copyright © World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine 1986

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