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Bedford Square and Russell Square. The Duke of Bedford – family name Russell – still owns swathes of the golden postcodes of central London. Both developed in Georgian times, the former square is mainly intact; the latter, mostly rebuilt. Each side of Bedford Square was treated as a single unit in construction and design terms. The terraced houses have brick elevations, Coade stone quoins decorating the doorcases, and wrought iron balconies to the piano nobile. The centre of each terrace is stuccoed, pedimented and pilastered.
Eleanor Coade invented and produced the eponymous artificial stone which was one of the most widely used building materials of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A ceramic material made of a secret recipe, Coade stone is exceptionally resistant to weathering and erosion. Such versatility made it popular for architectural details and sculpture. In later life Eleanor was an active philanthropist. She stipulated to women benefactors named in her will that none of their husbands were to touch the bequests.
Bedford Square now has prestigious occupiers such as the Architectural Association Bookshop, Consulate General of the Republic of Angola, Magg Brothers Rare Books and Manuscripts, and Spparc Architecture. The northeast side backs on to the British Museum with its Enlightenment Room celebrating the age of reason, discovery and learning. St Gile’s Hotel bravely raises its Brutalist head over the southwest corner of the roofscape of Bedford Square, contrasting with the neoclassical architecture below. Fitzrovia was and is an area of knowledge and culture.
Number 47 is the stuccoed midpoint of the southeast side and is the address of Yale University Press, especially known for Pevsner architecture guides. Printing, the art preservative of all the arts, takes centre stage on Bedford Square. Depth of classical knowledge, brutally honest expression of form, a female trailblazer in her chosen field … a segue is barely required such is the connective tissue to the launch of Dr Charlotte Blease’s latest book.
She is a Northern Irish philosopher of medicine whose research concentrates on the ethical, psychological and social dimensions of healthcare innovation with a focus on the use of AI technologies in clinical settings. Charlotte is currently an Associate Professor in the Medical Faculty at Uppsala University Sweden and a research affiliate in the Digital Psychiatry Programme at Beth Israel Deaconess Harvard Medical School.
Dr Bot: Why Doctors Can Fail Us – and How AI Could Save Lives has received glowing reviews from the right (Daily Mail) to the left (The Guardian). International coverage has included interviews on CNN Washington, The Times Radio London and Ireland’s most listened to radio show, Pat Kenny on Ireland AM. She explains, “There are very human problems with medicine. For example, keeping up to date with information. I made a calculation a couple of years ago that there’s a new biomedical article published every 39 seconds. If doctors were to read just two percent of these it would take them 22.5 hours per day. AI can crunch through information at breakneck speed. That doesn’t mean to say that AI is without problems.”
Heather McCallum, Managing Director of Yale University Press, opens the book launch: “Charlotte has a gift for making the very complex accessible. She is producing and digesting mountains of cutting edge work and translating it into a form for people to understand and be appreciate of the ideas. That is a huge talent! I think Charlotte is a luminary. She is also fun and charismatic. I was absolutely thrilled that she chose to commit her book to Yale to publish. This is a heartfelt book for today. Charlotte’s star is in the ascendant.”
Leading academic and former general practitioner Dr Richard Lehman is the guest speaker: “The great message of Charlotte’s book is it’s not because doctors are fallible beings and therefore should be dissed. It’s because they need support of the kind that has never been available before. This is an amazing opportunity. I think it’s absolutely marvellous that Charlotte has packed so much in that has real intellectual clout and depth and personal research together with a catchy title and this superb style which can be hilarious at times. This book deserves a conference in its own right!”
Charlotte posits, “The key issue is who or what could do a better job of delivering healthcare. My book isn’t, though, a love letter to technology. My background is philosophy so I’m thinking about this in a balanced way. We’ve got to consider the fact that AI can be people pleasing, it can be obsequious – there’s a whole cluster of biases that can persist. The opportunity here however is to see if we can find ways to debias these tools to reduce inequality in healthcare.” Patients are at the centre of this book: the reader is reminded that the care of the patient is the purpose of medicine. She poses and answers the key question: who or what might do a better job of delivering that?
Dr Bot is the first book to deeply consider the diverse range of physical and psychological pitfalls associated with traditional medical visits. Two underlying arguments are “The belief that we live in the best of all possible worlds takes the path of least resistance” and “To improve medicine, we should expect to do things differently”. The surveys underpinning her views are original (for example, investigating American psychiatrists’ use of commercial generative AI bots) and expansive (such as interviewing 1,000 British general practitioners about the future of their job).
There’s a smorgasbord of delicious titbits in this book. For starters, a delightful description of verbal discourse, “Among strangers, the flow of conversation can vary considerably: sometimes chatter courses like a bounteous brook, other times it sputters like a faulty faucet.” For mains, “Whether as a clinician or a patient, we enter the consulting room equipped with a suite of inbuilt algorithms sculpted for life on the savannahs of Africa.” And just desserts, “Medical doctors gulp down many bitter pills too.”
Drawing on patients’ and personal experience, heartwarming and sometimes heart wrenching stories are balanced with light heartedness. Lady Gaga’s lesson on the benefits of hard work (spoiler alert: it often leads to success) is an unexpected find in a book about doctors and technology. As is a well known American brasserie chain: “When a doctor introduces herself, she will not say, ‘Hi, my name is Sandra, I will be looking after you.’ This is not Hooters. In fact, it’s unlikely that she (or he) will use their first name.”
Charlotte’s stance is objective: this is neither a love letter to technology nor medical doctors. “The risks and benefits of what technology can offer, and how it can be tamed,” she opines, “will need to be pursued actively and robustly, with moral imagination.” Provocative yet respectful, cleverly written but highly readable, robust and entertaining, written with a “splinter of ice” (author’s words) while filled with uplifting anecdotes, Dr Bot is a gripping read and an intriguingly insightful vision of the future of healthcare.
There are quite a few blue plaques on the houses of Bedford Square dedicated to men of distinction: William Butterfield, architect; John Scott, Lord Chancellor; Thomas Hodgkin, philanthropist; Sir Anthony Hope, novelist; Sir Harry Ricardo, mechanical engineer; Ram Mohun Roy, scholar; and Thomas Wakley, reformer. A blue plaque to a woman of distinction is now required outside number 47: “Charlotte Blease, philosopher and writer. Birthplace of the publication of her literary masterpiece Dr Bot: Why Doctors Can Fail Us – and How AI Could Save Lives.”
