24 Facts About Petr Skrabanek

Petr Skrabanek was a doctor, physician, professor of medicine, and author of several books and many articles.

Petr Skrabanek was a polymath, loving jazz, history, literature and playing the piano.

Petr Skrabanek spoke several languages thanks to which he was able to deeply study Joyce's last work - the avant-garde novel Finnegans Wake.

Petr Skrabanek studied chemistry, joining the faculty of Natural Sciences at Charles University in Prague in 1957.

Petr Skrabanek frequently contributed short articles to the Czechoslovakian science journal Vesmir.

In 1967 Petr Skrabanek was selected to spend a month in Galway Regional Hospital.

Petr Skrabanek left this post in 1975 to join the Endocrine oncology research team at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital as a senior research fellow, and as a leading specialist, he became involved in research into the neurotransmitter substance P At the same time he completed his doctoral thesis "Inappropriate Production of Hormonal Peptides in Neoplasia".

Petr Skrabanek 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.

Petr Skrabanek soon became a member of the Lancet Editorial Board and a valued, independent contributor.

In 1984, through Lancet, Petr 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.

Petr Skrabanek maintained his reputation as a stringent and scathing critic of dogmas, sham, and wishful thinking pertaining to the areas of preventive medicine and alternative medicine.

In 1991, Petr Skrabanek became a Fellow of board of directors of Trinity College and the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland.

Petr Skrabanek says that the goal was no longer to help sick individuals, but to have a positive influence on the entire population.

Petr Skrabanek writes that health ceases to be private and individual, instead becoming a moral duty, a new religion with priests and dogmas.

Petr Skrabanek says that the state tries to interfere with the way of life, even against the wishes and interest of citizens.

Petr 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.

Petr Skrabanek disagrees with prohibitions of all kinds, with the fight against tobacco, obesity, alcohol consumption, and, on the contrary, the promotion of jogging and yogurt.

Petr Skrabanek learned several major European languages during his student years, and was private pupil of rabbi Richard Feder in Brno and learned Hebrew.

Petr Skrabanek wrote his first article on Joyce in A Wake Newslitter in 1971.

Petr Skrabanek 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 published articles about the use of Hebrew, Armenian, Japanese, Afar, and Irish English in Finnegans Wake.

Three years after his death, the Petr Skrabanek Foundation was established by his wife, friends and associates.

Petr Skrabanek was accused by the press of having been in the pay of the tobacco industry.

Petr Skrabanek was a good scientist, as his work on substance P testifies, but this was not to be his metier.

In 2005, the president of the Dutch anti-quackery organisation Vereniging tegen de Kwakzalverij, Cees Renkens, wrote that Petr Skrabanek was one of the first to warn for the dangers of 'randomised clinical trials of absurd claims' and pleaded for the 'demarcation of the absurd'.