Petr Skrabanek (October 27, 1940 – June 21, 1994) was a doctor, physician, professor of medicine, and author of several books and many articles.
For the next four years he worked for the Medical Research Council laboratory and the department of internal medicine of Jervis Street Hospital.
He wrote more than 300 articles, at first purely professional, but later he applied his broad knowledge towards commenting on current and general issues of medicine and science.
[5][10] In 1984, through Lancet, Skrabanek met his future colleague and collaborator James McCormick, who offered him a position at the Trinity College Dublin Department of Community Health with a grant from the Wellcome Foundation.
"[11][6]While at Trinity, Skrabanek said "One of my duties is to protect people against the harm that over-enthusiastic doctors and misguided politicians can inflict upon them.
[17] The collection which we have compiled may give the false impression that doctors are at best charlatans and at worst rogues, and that medicine is itself a major threat to health.
Another chapter is about alternative medicine, the validity of which he clearly rejects without tolerance or attempted reconciliation:[5] The pursuit of health is a symptom of unhealth.
When this pursuit is no longer a personal yearning but part of state ideology, healthism for short, it becomes a symptom of political sickness.
This was published in 1994, a year after Skrabanek's death, and had mixed reception; there was admiration and approval, but also sharp disagreement and resistance.
[citation needed] In the book, Skrabanek comments on the current change in the understanding of medicine advocated by American and English medical societies and their governments.
Skrabanek criticizes what he sees as the obsession with super-health, maximum prolongation of life, healthism and lifestylism, but especially with the coercion of the citizens to achieve these ideals.
When this pursuit is no longer a personal yearning but part of state ideology, healthism for short, it becomes a symptom of political sickness."
Skrabanek also relies on his criticism of the evidence that most of the preventive and screening actions are less effective, scientifically unsubstantiated, and are often only a manifestation of the desire of bureaucracy for power and the efforts of pharmaceutical companies to increase profits.
Skrabanek and his wife Věra decided to improve their basic knowledge of English by reading each day to each other several pages of Ulysses.
[6] Skrabanek's first encounter with Finnegans Wake was through an excerpt of the Anna Livia Plurabella section translated into Czech by Zdeněk Urbánek in 1966.
He focused mainly on the analysis of Joyce's work language components: his main contribution to the study of Joyce's literary experiment is the extensive dictionary of expressions taken from Slavic languages, but he also published articles about the use of Hebrew, Armenian, Japanese, Afar, and Irish English in Finnegans Wake.
During the compilation of his Slavonic index, he was able to locate the elements from Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian and Bulgarian language.