New light on John Woodall, surgeon and adventurer.

In Memory of Ray Reiter (1939-2002)

This quotation from John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman concludes Ray’s 1980 paper, “A Logic for Default Reasoning,” one of the most influential and widely cited papers in all AI. The quotation captures what was special about Ray: He had an adventurer’s desire to go beyond the boundaries of our current understanding, together with a mathematician’s insistence on precision. Ray the adven...

Dissolution of the I.M.S.

Our service dissolves on the 14th of August, 1947, and I send you this letter of retrospect and farewell. Our history as a service dates back to 1612 when on the formation of the East India Company into a jointstock business, John Woodall was appointed the first Surgeon-General of the Company. He held this office for nearly thirty years and for many years was the only Surgeon-General of the Com...

Philosophy in John Gardner’s Grendel

John Gardner’s Grendel is a celebrated example of the ontological postmodernist fiction. Along with a discovery of self with which Grendel the narrator of the novel is concerned, grand narratives such as philosophy are questioned. Grendel denies the external objective reality and generously allows the legitimacy of fantastic and non-realistic methods by using “life-affirming fabulous art” as it...

Another pandemic disaster looms: yellow fever spreading from Angola

Pan African Medical Journal. 2016; 24:107 doi:10.11604/pamj.2016.24.107.9921 This article is available online at: http://www.panafrican-med-journal.com/content/article/24/107/full/ © John Payne Woodall et al. The Pan African Medical Journal ISSN 1937-8688. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/...

In this month’s Bulletin