RE: What are you reading?
January 21, 2024 at 12:31 pm
(This post was last modified: January 21, 2024 at 12:31 pm by Fake Messiah.)
Relatively recently I've read "Calling Dr Horowitz" (1977) which is a memoir on which the movie "Bad Medicine" was based upon.
I always kind of wanted to read this book because the movie is kind of insane (if not offensive). It features American students who had bad grades so they couldn't get into any medical school in the US and thus went to study in Mexico. The movie rips on Mexicans making them look primitive: like they spit on sick people three times to "heal" them and the medical students steal bodies from the graveyard so that they can have something to dissect during classes.
So I wondered how much of this was true. It turns out very little. Surprisingly, only a small part is in Mexico. There is (was) a scheme that underachieving students used to go to Mexico, but only for like a year, after which they would transfer to Canada and then to the US. And only the part about stealing the "fresh" corpses from the graveyard was true.
I always kind of wanted to read this book because the movie is kind of insane (if not offensive). It features American students who had bad grades so they couldn't get into any medical school in the US and thus went to study in Mexico. The movie rips on Mexicans making them look primitive: like they spit on sick people three times to "heal" them and the medical students steal bodies from the graveyard so that they can have something to dissect during classes.
So I wondered how much of this was true. It turns out very little. Surprisingly, only a small part is in Mexico. There is (was) a scheme that underachieving students used to go to Mexico, but only for like a year, after which they would transfer to Canada and then to the US. And only the part about stealing the "fresh" corpses from the graveyard was true.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
