The
Pharmaceutical Journal Vol 266 No 7130 p38 Native hue of resolution
Art with a meaning
Bullies in our midst
No doubt most new year resolutions year have already been broken. It is a
mystery to me why people, at the artificial pivot of a new year, should make
a habit of passing resolutions that they have scant intention of keeping. Possibly
the custom derives from an older idea that the passing of one calendar year
and the birth of another is a suitable time for divination to determine the
future of one’s life.
Yet today the term resolution is usually applied to minor and petty matters
that are unlikely to make much difference to one’s future welfare, and which
one knows, if one is honest, will be buried in the past within a few weeks at
most. A regular resolution for many smokers and drinkers is to give up the bad
habit of years. Others vow to be more sympathetic towards a dominant mother-in-law,
or to spend more time assisting in the domestic chores.
To analyse the bad habits that detract from our own lifestyle and impinge on
the interests of others must surely be a step towards perfection. Our awareness
of them depends upon our power of introspection and upon our attitude towards
what we may imagine to be harmless indulgences. If we possess legalistic minds,
we may even invoke the issue of human rights, on our own behalf. But, by and
large, we rarely discipline ourselves to make a serious attempt to render the
coming year less slipshod than its predecessor.
But why restrict ourselves to the new year? A birthday or a wedding anniversary
is surely just as apt an occasion for reform. And why stop at petty personal
idiosyncrasies? We might with advantage turn our attention to making an impact
on the political machinery by which we are beset, and on our own professional
bodies.
All the evidence points to a failure of individual pharmacists to make their
weight felt in the affairs of the Society and of other professional organisations.
The result of such neglect is to raise doubts over whether partisan arguments
may or may not be influencing pharmaceutical affairs below the surface, and
distorting the image which the public holds of us and our work.
We have recently been told that we might learn from the nursing profession,
which has during recent years managed to present a united front to public and
politicians alike, and so has risen considerably in public esteem and forced
the political holders of the purse strings to pay serious attention to professional
complaints. The time has come for pharmacists to make their own resolutions
for 2001.
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A particularly interesting facet of primeval art is described in a report
in Science for October 20, 2000. It concerns some paintings discovered
in a cave situated in the north-west of Verona in northern Italy. Excavations
carried out in the Fumane cave unearthed five stone slabs bearing images of
human and animal figures painted in red ochre but much obscured by an ancient
deposit of calcite.The slabs appeared to have fallen from the cave roof and
lay embedded in floor sediments which had been dated to 32,000 to 36,500 years
before present, a date verified by radiocarbon determinations of minute samples
of charcoal gathered from the site. Red ochre pigment cannot be dated by similar
means, but there is no reason to doubt the antiquity of the decorated slabs.
The cave, which has been undergoing excavation since 1988, had already yielded
evidence of very early occupation by humans, who had left stone implements there.
The layers of calcite which prevented proper examination of the painting beneath
were largely removed by an expert art restorer. The designs on three of the
slabs have not yet been deciphered, but the other two display a four-legged
animal and a human figure 18cm high which bears an animal head on its trunk,
resembling some previously discovered in some so-called “sorcerer” decorated
caves. A hybrid figure of a rhinoceros-headed human has been found at Chauvet
in southern France and a statuette of a lion-headed human figure in southern
Germany, calculated to be roughly 30,000 years old.
The importance of the new find is that it indicates that very early man was
possessed of an artistic imagination enabling him to create abstractions which
appear to have some religious inspiration. It is quite evident that the ability
to put ideas from abstractions into artistic design can be traced far back in
the ancestry of Homo sapiens.
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A rather alarming account of the bullying that goes on in organisations, not
least health care units, is given by Sean Cusack, of the regional services department
of the British Medical Association, Bristol, in the Lancet for December
23/30, 2000. He admits that there is no agreed definition of bullying, but suggests
that three elements of bullying behaviour may be distinguished. These are: the
effects on the victim, irrespective of the intention of the bully; the negative
nature of these effects; and the persistence of the behaviour.
It is difficult to distinguish bullying from interpersonal rivalry and from
legitimate management. Most reports are of downwards victimisation of employees
by managers, but peer groups are capable of sideways bullying, and managers
may be bullied by workers.
Bullying is rarely of a physical nature, but may take the form of threats to
professional status, threats to personal standing, isolation, overworking and
destabilisation. Public humiliation, denial of access to training, disruption,
removal of responsibility and excess pressure to produce results may be involved,
none of them being a proof of bullying.
A questionnaire study of health care workers in south-east England has shown
that some 40 per cent of them had been bullied or seen others bullied during
the previous year. Those who suffered reported less satisfaction in their work
and higher stress levels, and were more likely to leave their workplace. In
Finland, there was an association between workplace bullying and sick leave.
No correlation appeared between being a bullying victim and age, sex, occupational
background, and health habits such as alcohol or tobacco consumption or physical
activity.
Professional status does not provide immunity from bullying, which has been
found to be no less prevalent among health care workers than it is among others.
The true extent of bullying is probably underrated, and recognition of it varies
from place to place. The historical development of particular workplace cultures
may have some bearing on the frequency of bullying, some cultures lending themselves
more than others to a bullying atmosphere.
It will be hard to change cultural characteristics in order to reduce the incidence
of bullying techniques, but the issue should be faced.
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