Julia Owen, Retinitis Pigmentosa and the Media. Part 3

Note: For new readers, this is the direct continuation of Part 2.

The BBC TV ‘Nationwide: Cause for Concern’ documentary, 3 January 1979

As a conclusion to this series on Julia Owen, I offer a summary and transcribed excerpts from an audio recording of the BBC TV Nationwide ‘Cause for Concern’ programme, broadcast on 3 January 1979. I am grateful to Roger Halhead for supplying me with an excellent mp3 recording (to replace my decaying audio cassette of a recording in circulation shortly after the programme was transmitted) as well as sharing his reminiscences and research. I am also obliged to Roger for his technical help in transcribing one of the revealing emotional segments in the audio recording.

I fully acknowledge that Copyright for this programme belongs to BBC TV or BBC Nationwide (1979) and I sincerely hope that my use of their material here will be considered “fair dealing” on a matter of public interest, namely the history of alternative treatments for disabilities in the United Kingdom (especially as there seems to be only one full recording of this old TV programme, not at the BBC but in the British National Film Archives – information from Roger Halhead, quoting Steve Bryant).

The title and first few words are missing from Halhead’s mp3 recording. A female announcer (Sue Lawley?) introduces the programme:

“ …. can cure blindness. She charges up to £4,000 but does the cure work?
It’s 6.20 on Wednesday, January the 3rd [1979]. We begin with a story from the world of fringe medicine. Roger Cook reports on a supposed cure for blindness that has not only proved highly expensive to those who’ve taken it but decidedly painful as well.”

The now legendary BBC investigative reporter Roger Cook (still flourishing 32 years later, after a unique career on BBC and ITV – see Wikipedia – in an Emeritus Professor avatar) then skilfully interweaves the stories of three dissatisfied 1978 RP patients and rigorous interviews with medical specialists and a bee venom researcher. He also interviews Julia Owen in her home, giving her the chance she craved to be on prime time TV to explain and justify her work. But the evidence and research are overwhelming and her ranting performance, all too familiar to her bee-stung patients, may have surprised even Roger Cook.

The first disgruntled patient interviewed is John Neil Smith, from Western Australia. His evidence is compelling. (My recent attempt to contact him has not been successful. I hope he sees this blog.)

Roger Cook: “John Neil Smith suffers from Retinitis Pigmentosa, a disease of the eyes that will eventually leave him totally blind. Six months ago, he came to England from Australia to spend his savings on a remarkable cure for blindness. In an Australian newspaper he’d read about a treatment being carried out by a woman in London, a treatment which she claimed had already successfully cured every one of her patients. The woman was called Julia Owen. The treatment involved being stung by bees, day after day for months on end.
…

Cook: “At Bromley in South London, John Neil Smith was installed in this house. Julia Owen has seventeen such properties [to be fair: she rented them or most of them, and never struck me as being particularly rich] in which her patients pay around £60 a week for a room. Once there, John, like all the other patients, was discouraged from going out or even speaking to the neighbours. The next day the agonising treatment began.”
[…]

Cook: “Bees are allowed to sting the patient about the face, neck and hands, ten or twelve of them, one after the other. The stings are then left throbbing in the patient for a further two hours. Just how this affects the eyesight is known only to Julia Owen, a remarkable 70-year old Austrian who has no medical qualifications and is at war with the whole medical profession.”
[…]
Cook: “Mrs Owen claims that the secret of her bees lies in what she feeds them: a cocktail of alcohol and herbs, which she claims affects the bees’ venom and enables her to cure anything from dermatitis to deafness.”

[Patient in background …]
Mrs Owen: “I feed them “fonguy” [fungi]. What “fonguy” I feed them is I use whisky, wine. I use the best – the very best – spirit and I ferment several herbs in it. And when the fermentation come on the top it does come up just like a mushroom, and when is coming a mushroom is a “fonguy”. Then I put it into the extractor and that’s what I put in wid de honey for them to feed.”

Cook: It says in your literature that you’re invariably successful.”
Mrs Owen: “Always, not invariably, Always!”

Cook: “But by September, John Neil Smith was a very disillusioned man. He’d already paid out £4,000, with no improvement in his sight at all nor, he says, in any of the other patients that he’d met. And there were more shocks in store: Mrs Owen demanded another £3,500 to carry on with the treatment, and much more money to cure a number of other illnesses she’d apparently discovered, including gout and rheumatoid arthritis.”

JNS: “This was news to me, but she had written to my wife giving a terrible picture of me as a possible rheumatic cripple and being useless to myself and everybody else. This terrorising of my wife naturally resulted in great stress for me.”

“One morning Mrs Owen came in, said she had bad news for me and proceeded to tell me that she wanted to cease the treatment because in her words if she continued with the present medication, it “would bust my liver” – to use her words. Then she suggested that I should go home, have a four months rest and then return to begin another course of bee treatment, using different medication and, of course, bringing the three and a half thousand pounds plus money for this rheumatic treatment she’d suggested. The amount for this was unspecified.”

Cook: “So what happened, John, when she suddenly said she was going to discontinue the treatment?”

JNS: “Well, I felt disinclined to come back because I [??] any improvement whatsoever in my eyes and so I asked for a refund of my money for the two month treatment which I had not received. This she emphatically refused and followed up with a stream of abuse in which she said if I didn’t come back, I would be crippled as well as blinded and as I carry my tape recorder around with me as a kind of notebook, I just switched on and recorded this conversation which utterly amazed me.” [Smith’s recording is not easy to follow here but it contains this important evidence.]

Owen: “What the hell is wrong with you, man? [you come all that far for your eyesight…you never get better if you don't think straight].”
JNS: “I wanted to say that I’ve had four months of my treatment [which leaves the balance of two months].”

Owen: “Yes! If you don’t want to go blind […] trouble. I don’t want to have any arguments with you. You please yourself what you do […] do not stain my character.”
JNS “Mrs Owen, I’m not staining your character.”

Owen [Screaming]: “You DO! […] You are the most stupid man on earth!”
*

The second interviewee was Roger Halhead, who first went to see Mrs Owen in 1976 and finally left in May 1978 for a recommended “rest” for his body to recover from the upheaval caused by the venom “clearing out his system”.

[Background scene: serene Lake Windermere]

Cook: “Another patient of Julia Owen at the time was Roger Halhead, a trainee accountant from Grange-over-Sands in Cumbria. He has Retinitis Pigmentosa and likes to get out into the countryside he loves while he can still see it.”

RH: “In 1973 I was registered partially sighted and told that I had incurable eye disease but
two and a half years ago I heard of Mrs Owen and her bee sting treatment and [that] she offered a cure for Retinitis Pigmentosa so I wrote to her and she rang me up after she received my letter and told me a lot about the people she’d cured and said that she would be able to cure me and that I would be able to return to accountancy which I’d had to give up two years previously because of my failing eyesight.”

Cook: “You mean that she told you she could cure you without even seeing you?”
RH: “Yes. She said on the phone that she would be able to cure me and she hadn’t seen me then.”

Cook: “What happened then?”
RH: “Well, I thought very carefully about it because the treatment is very expensive. She did ask for two and a half thousand pounds at that time. Later we had to pay £3,000. And we decided to go ahead with it because there was nothing else and when you have an eye problem that’s getting worse, then you clutch at anything you can.”

Cook: “So you paid your £3,000 altogether. Did you get receipts?”
RP: “No, we didn’t, never got a receipt for the money and I went to start my treatment in September 1976 and it went on until the end of May 1978.”

Cook: “And, looking back on it, was there – is there- any improvement in your sight?”
RH: “No. There’s no permanent improvement because this September [1978] I went to see an eye specialist and my eyesight’s sufficiently bad to be put on the blind register now.”
*
Cook: “Yes. Roger Halhead and others signed statements which said they’d had remarkable cures, statements that soon found their way into the headlines.”
*
Cook: “But why would you want to do that when there wasn’t really any improvement? I mean, what made you feel you had to?”
RH: “Well, it’s very difficult because this Mrs Owen has a sort of, has a power over you and you feel that if you don’t please her then she’ll send you home. Then you wouldn’t have the treatment so you don’t get the chance. So you want to keep going with the treatment because maybe it’s going to work and you want to have it for as long as you can.”

Cook: “So if these cures are not by and large true, what is it that’s kept everyone from bringing this out in public?”
RH: “Well, mostly fear. Mrs Owen writes letters to them, threatening – well, I can only describe it as a threatening letter I received several weeks ago saying that if my scandalising got back to her, she would then take me to the High Court, and never mind who got busted. So, naturally, people are very frightened to take it out in the open.”

Cook: “We contacted six other people who’ve been patients of Mrs Owen over the past year. Not one of them, has been cured despite her claims of 100% success. Among them was seventeen-year old Maribel Steel, from Melbourne, Australia. She’d been brought over for the bee treatment by her father but he’d had to hurry back home when he heard that his wife was dying. Back in Australia, John Steel [=Brian. the present writer] would get letters from Mrs Owen telling him of Maribel’s fantastic progress.”

[Actor, quoting from a letter from Mrs Owen to Steel]: “She now walks in the street most beautifully and is capable of doing anything and everything without fumbling. She can watch anything and everything on television.”
Steel (by phone from Australia): “Maribel’s letters, which would often arrive the same day, would tell a rather different story, namely that Mrs Owen, every time she came round for the bee treatment, would ask her, ‘Can you see better?’ Maribel would reply, ‘No, Mrs Owen.” Mrs Owen would repeat the question. My daughter would say ‘No’ again, and in the end Mrs Owen would more or less scream it at her, trying to browbeat her, bully her into saying that there was an improvement which didn’t exist.”

Cook: “Why, then, didn’t you challenge Mrs Owen?”
Steel: “Why didn’t I challenge her? There was too much at stake. I obviously hoped for some improvement for my daughter. When you have any sort of hope, when you think that someone might be able to do something, you go all the way to cooperate. You see, the big problem here is that Mrs Owen has tremendous power over her patients. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone with such power over people – and abusing that power at the same time.”

Cook: “On the 17th of August this year [1978], Maribel was turned out into the streets by Mrs Owen, seventeen years old, practically blind, and all alone, 6,000 miles from home.”
*

Roger Cook follows these accounts with a number of specialist opinions.

Cook: “Stories like these come as no surprise to the medical profession, which has the gravest of suspicions about Mrs Owen and her wonder cure. Among the leading surgeons in the field is John Kelsey, who runs a Retinitis Pigmentosa clinic at Moorfields Eye Hospital [London].”

Kelsey: “It is a gradual, basically a rotting of the eye and eventually the patients will go blind. Um, it is very often, or mostly, inherited, by various ways, and depending on the type of inheritance, the blindness occurs sooner or later. Some will go blind in very early infancy, others will go blind at the age of 70 or 80. The problem is that we know nothing about the base of this condition, and we know no treatment whatsoever.”

Cook: “And what are the secret ingredients of the bee venom which Julia Owen claims does the trick? Biochemists at London’s University College have been analysing bee venom for years and reckon they know pretty well all there is to know about it. Special precautions are taken in the handling of it. Much of what is in it is a natural detergent called melatin, which destroys all human cells. And among other harmful ingredients is apimin, which, if injected in minute quantities, can kill.”

Female Researcher: “A lot of very nasty things are present in bee venom and we know quite a lot about them.”
Cook: “And therefore, presumably, that it’s pretty dangerous stuff to play about with.”
Researcher: “Well, indeed. I would never advocate that anybody was stung by a bee, whether singly and certainly not multiply.”

Cook: “Is there anything to substantiate claims that different kinds of bees, different species, behave in a different way or that by feeding them special things you can make them sting in a special way?”
Researcher: “All I can say about that is that there is no evidence of any change in the composition of bee venom, regardless of where bees come from. They can come from Mexico, or United States, or any part of Europe, and the venoms from these bees, from different species of bees, all seem to contain the same identified components. I believe that the treatment that Julia Owen is using is raising false hopes. She is using this treatment for a condition for which there is no known cure. She is using a treatment which we know to be potentially hazardous from everything we have discovered about the composition of crude bee venom.”
*
Cook: “Julia Owen’s honey bees have certainly become money bees. Every year scores of patients pay several thousand pounds each for the cure.”

Finally, somewhat reminiscent of the inevitable terminal phase of a bullfight, comes the pièce de résistance of Roger Cook’s [December] interview with Mrs Owen.

Mrs Owen: “My life is so wonderful! You fellows never understand it. I curse the doctors day and night because they’re killing me because I can do what they can’t. What I do is out of this world.”

Cook: “It seems, though, that when things go wrong, it’s always the patient’s fault.”
Mrs O: “Yes! Definitely. Always. One 100% always.”

Cook: “What happens if somebody’s allergic to bees?”
Mrs O: “Never. In my cases, they’re never allergic. Never, never, never.”

Cook: “Cos it could kill them if they were, couldn’t it?”
Mrs O: “No. Not these bees. They haven’t got any poison in them what could kill you,”

Cook: “You see, we’ve spoken to some people who’ve had your treatment who say they’re not cured.
Mrs O: “Who are they?”

Cook: “There are a number of people. […]”

When Cook offers some names, Mrs Owen launches into a tirade about the detrimental effect of sexual arousal on RP patients’ eyes, prompting Roger Cook’s alert objection:
“But that doesn’t send you blind, though.”
Mrs O: “Pardon. It does send you blind in many cases, many cases. Oh, yes, I know that. That’s the trouble. It’s a much bigger disaster to your eyesight, much bigger strain on it.”

Cook: “But apparently you told him you could cure him before you’d even seen him.”
Mrs O: [interrupting]: “Nobody told him they could cure him. No, no, no. They can make up any story they like. Nobody. If they say that, I want it in writing and I’ve got a wonderful case to bust them wholesale [i.e. for libel]. I’ve no worry.”

Cook: “You had him sign a statement saying that his vision had improved.”
Mrs O: “ No. I never asked him to sign a statement. He wrote it on his own accord. I don’t go on like that, thank you very much.”

Cook: “Are you saying that one of the foremost eye surgeons in the country and the foremost research laboratory, the only research laboratory, almost, in the world, into bee venom, are talking rubbish?”
Mrs O: “Talking bloody rubbish! Absolute rubbish! One hundred per cent, because, look, how are you going to tell me what is in the bee venom when the bee has got such a tiny little bee venom sac?”

[Conclusion by the “prosecution”:]

Roger Cook:
“Well, who do you believe? Julia Owen, with her whisky-drinking bees, or the doctors and the biochemists who’ve spent years researching the subject and say it’s all dangerous nonsense? Course, it wouldn’t be the first time in history that an eccentric has proved the whole medical profession wrong but the results in this case don’t seem to point that way.

“Despite Mrs Owen’s claims of 100% success, not one of her former patients that we contacted had been cured and she seems curiously reluctant to have her claims put to any sort of scientific test. I wonder why. Until she does, the only certain thing is that, one way or another, her patients will go on being well and truly stung,”

© 1979 BBC TV Nationwide
*

The BBC was not taken to the High Court by Mrs Owen. On the contrary, following that devastating investigative documentary on prime time Sunday TV, Julia Owen seems to have slipped instantly into the shadows. Her chauffeur and assistant, Geoffrey Button, is said to have left her employment at that time. Whether Mrs Owen reverted to her less polemical treatment for arthritis and asthma is still unclear but to my knowledge there has been no further news of her treatment of RP sufferers. Most of her prior and subsequent biography (she was born circa 1906) remains shrouded in mystery, awaiting the patience of a future investigator.

Other relevant blogs on Mrs Julia Owen can be found here and here.

Retinitis Pigmentosa Associations in many countries
The U.S. Retinitis Pigmentosa Association was formed in 1971. Information on national RP Associations can be obtained from The Foundation Fighting Blindness. It would seem reasonable to assume that the huge publicity about Julia Owen in the 1970s may have had an influence on the setting up of the UK RP Association in 1975 and the Australian counterpart (in 1979, according to Leighton Boyd, doyen of the Victorian RP Association).
*

One cloud’s silver lining

In spite of enduring over one thousand bee stings from Mrs Owen’s “medicated” bees, as well as five months of her bullying and cajoling, Maribel Steel actually benefited from the ordeal inflicted by her distraught but well-meaning parents because the months spent away from their (our) overprotection enabled her to begin to surmount her extreme disability. Although still no less blind, she has slowly gone from strength to strength and is now revealing parts of her fascinating life journey and is sharing her experiences as a disabled person, on her brand new blog: http://gatewaytoblindness.blogspot.com .
What a daughter! ¡Olé mi niña! And what a mother and grandmother!

Julia Owen, Retinitis Pigmentosa and the Media. Part 2

Note: This is the direct continuation of Part 1.

Caveat: In view of Mrs Julia Owen’s ephemeral notoriety in the 1970s for claiming dramatic cures for Retinitis Pigmentosa with the venom of medicated bees, it is necessary to highlight the long-standing use of apitherapy and bee venom for the treatment of arthritis, asthma and other conditions. (See, for example, Wikipedia.)
*
Since she had no official backing or recognition for her largely undocumented decades of unorthodox treatments for arthritis and asthma, Mrs Owen had always had to pay special attention to self-promotion (including three self-published books). Her exclusive concentration on RP and the pursuit of belated recognition of her life’s work followed the widely-read 1975 report by Ena Kendall in the prestigious UK Observer Magazine. From then on, Mrs Owen was naturally inundated with requests for treatment by desperately hopeful RP sufferers and their families, particularly from UK and Australia. In what was to prove both her heyday and her swansong, she worked indefatigably in the period 1975-1978 treating her patients and, with their carefully enlisted help, publicising her claimed miracle cures as widely as she could.

As an eye-witness bystander in the period February to May 1978, when I accompanied my daughter Maribel for part of her five months of unsuccessful treatment (1,000 stings) in Bromley, Kent, I have been able to call on my notes, newspaper clippings and my conversations with a few other patients resident in Bromley (a social practice discouraged by Mrs Owen). These experiences are supplemented by my daughter’s letters and her memories of the crucial months of June to early August, when she was finally evicted by Mrs Owen, and our subsequent experiences with the UK media. I also acknowledge the valuable contributions of my friends Roger Halhead and Queenslander Ben O’Rourke, two of Mrs Owen’s 1978 patients, and I belatedly express my gratitude to Bromley neighbours Anna-Liese Burton and her late husband, John, for their kindness and help during our somewhat bizarre stay in one of Mrs Owen’s leased mansions in Bickley.

A note on Mrs Owen’s shadowy pedigree and her treatment system.

She claimed not to treat the eyes directly but to work on clearing each residential patient’s glands by stinging them every morning or afternoon over a period of several months with the medicated venom of semi-conscious (specially selected and bred) bees fed with different combinations of herbs and alcohol to suit each patient’s changing condition. She claimed to be able to diagnose the condition and progress by visual examination of the patient’s face and retina and by periodic urine analysis. (In his memoir Ordinary Daylight, Andrew Potok relates one session – which might be comic in different circumstances – where she gave a favourable description of progress in his retina without switching on the ophthalmoscope.) Owen claimed that her Austrian family had performed bee venom research and therapy for several generations. (I was never able to verify the Austrian link, her original surname, or the claim that she had studied to become a doctor but given up in disgust at their use of harmful drugs a few months before graduating but, partly based on her very thick mid-European accent, I had (and retain) a suspicion that even here Mrs Owen may have been embroidering on the truth.)

Having seen the results of between one and twelve stings delivered daily to the face, head, neck, shoulders and hands of my daughter (to be left throbbing for at least an hour), it was interesting to read later in Owen’s books that after giving the bees their last feed, she “pinched them behind the head so that they are not quite dead but not suffering. I then apply them to the patient.” The need for a long and careful treatment was constantly stressed. “I must explain that I have to test new patients for several weeks, sometimes months, before I know which glands need feeding and how many different medicaments will be necessary [for the bees] and how long it is likely to take.” Some pages of Owen’s self-published books are also given over (as were many of her monologues), to indignant stories of patients who have not followed instructions or have given up the treatment prematurely. And of others who have not paid her. And of doctors who, although denouncing her, try to steal her secrets from her. From patients’ accounts, it has become evident that another aspect of her modus operandi was to send the patient home, after several months, for a long rest so that the body, disturbed by the stings and the hormonal interaction, could prepare itself for a further period of bee sting treatment – which almost invariably did not take place.

On arriving for the daily stinging session, stern Mrs Owen, who would tolerate no arguments, and encouraged sycophantic obedience as an insurance policy for continued treatment, was in the habit of quizzing her patients on whether they could see better. If, as expected, they admitted to a slight improvement, she was pleased; if assured that they could not, Mrs Owen either ignored or berated them, according to her mood. She would frequently lecture her patients and others (including myself) on the miraculous nature of her RP treatment, her guarantee of a cure and the duty of patients to proclaim their good fortune to the world, preferably via the Press. She encouraged them to write down their recognition of an improvement with her treatment and, better still, to send their testimonial to the Press. One of her best known patients, Andrew Potok reproduces a sample of a detailed printed “before and after” Questionnaire (which can only have been composed by Mrs Owen or her secretary), which she gave to him to study (in 1976 or 1977), along with handwritten testimonials from patients or their families. The contents of several of these patient testimonials were mentioned in the UK and Australian media in 1977 and 1978.

At the beginning of a patient’s treatment, Julia Owen also handed out copies of some of these handwritten testimonials and occasionally photocopies of those that had reached the Press. Typical of the handwritten testimonials was the one from the grateful parents of two teenage sons, which she gave me in 1978. The letter thanked Owen for her treatment which had allegedly reversed one son’s RP and another son’s severe asthma.

Although newspaper records for the 1970s are not commonly found on the Internet, I offer as samples the few that I saw during 1978, both in UK and Australia.

4 April 1978, Sunday Express:
Robert Chapman: ‘Youth ‘losing sight’ says bees saved him’

Daily Mail, 19 May 1978:
‘Sting Cure. Bees saving my sight says man’

Here a 45-year-old Cornishman (who had only just begun his treatment) is quoted as saying that Mrs Owen’s treatment was already halting and reversing the rapid mid-life acceleration of the RP process. He promises to lobby his MP and ask for him to publicise Mrs Owen’s marvellous gift via the debating chamber of the House of Commons.

This claim can quickly be dismissed, from my personal experience. In fact, Mrs Owen’s chauffeur had driven the two of them (and myself) up to the House of Commons in London in April or May but the MP was not available so it turned out to be a wasted trip. Mr Rice withdrew from the treatment shortly afterwards, mainly, I believe, because of a lack of money to pay for it. [My hearsay: I think the intended deal was that she would treat Mr Rice free of charge in return for the favourable House of Commons mention and the coveted subsequent media reports.]

The Age, Melbourne, 5 August 1978
‘Sight is the sting in this tale’
A Perth man, Mick Kilpatrick, claims RP cure after six months of treatment.

The Australian Sunday Telegraph, 6 August 1978.
A front page article: “Blind Man Sees Again”
This is a longer version of the claim by Mick Kilpatrick, from Perth. He had been making the claim since about April as soon as the treatment had begun. As far as I know, Kilpatrick never retracted that statement.
(More on Mick from news.google.com in the Melbourne Age of 28 August 1978.
Two letters claiming successful cures were circulated (coincidentally?) at the time of the callous eviction of Maribel Steel (a week after her mother’s death) by Mrs Owen’s assistant and the subsequent call for police assistance by our friends. (Maybe there was a small item in the Bromley Times?)
18 August: M.B., London,
22 August: The mother of two boys, one with RP, the other with asthma (Colchester, Essex)

But, along with the dissident voices of one or two brave RP patients in mid-1978, there had already been signs that not everyone in the UK greeted the media stories of claimed cures for RP with delight. For example, a caveat was issued by the secretary of the recently formed British RP Society: “We cannot recommend any non-medical treatment for retinitis pigmentosa.”

On 11 May 1978, on Michael Aspel’s Help Line on Capital Radio (10 a.m.), Miss Shirley Dixon, a sufferer from RP and a member of the British RP Association phoned in to explain the nature of the degenerative disease (or group of diseases) and to emphasise, unofficially, that, in spite of press reports, there is no known treatment of RP and that she personally would not contemplate bee sting treatment.

In late September 1978, I returned to the UK to pick up my daughter after our bereavement and her dramatic eviction from her rented accommodation about a week after her mother’s death. In October or November, we were contacted by an Australian freelance journalist, John Lisners. I later found out that he had already been in contact with John Neil Smith, who would later be the principal witness in the BBC TV Nationwide programme on Mrs Owen. Lisners was interested enough in our story to travel down to Hampshire to interview and photograph Maribel and to accept the longish written account I had prepared. I subsequently found out that John was also interviewing other dissatisfied ex-recipients of stings, including our friend Roger Halhead. According to Roger, the popular Sunday People newspaper got cold feet about publishing the story (presumably because of Mrs Owen’s threats of litigation).
(Incidentally, while researching this blog, I was delighted to learn in late 2011 that a John Lisners is about to publish a probable bestseller on a fellow Australian: The Rise and Fall of the Rupert Murdoch Empire, to be published by John Blake in early 2012. I now know that this is the same John Lisners and he has offered to pass on anything of interest about the gestation of his investigation when the pre-publication pressure permits.)

With the surfacing of this evidence of discontent and questioning, BBC TV also became interested and conducted interviews with ex-patients in November and December 1978, notably with John Neil Smith of Australia and Roger Halhead (on 3 December, beside Lake Windermere near his Cumbrian home. I also participated briefly via telephone from Australia.

At the time of my phone interview on 8 December, Roger Cook’s assistant told me that as a result of their investigations and the sensational interview with Mrs Owen herself, the programme would be much longer than they had planned.

Parts of it will follow as Part 3 of this series (which will really be Part 5 of my Mrs Owen blogging phase).

Meanwhile, in conclusion, here are a few other background facts and comments to prepare young and middle-aged readers for their imminent meeting with the formidable Mrs O. (Here is a rare preview of her in action in 1954, shot by British Pathe News).

Although the Observer article had quoted Mrs Owen as saying she gave the treatment free, in the 1970s, RP patients and their families were charged both monthly rent, house utility expenses (notably electricity, heating and telephone) and a global fee of a few thousand pounds for the months of treatment (allegedly just to cover the cost of the “special” herbs needed for each separate case). Indeed, money was one of the main topics of conversation during many of the lady’s home visits, but, oddly, she was always quite slow in presenting the bill!

Some figures:
Multiply by 4 for approximate 2012 values but remember that it would still have been cheap if it had worked!

Andrew Potok: He was quoted ₤7,500, paid ₤1,000 (or ₤2,000?). Mrs Owen said that if he could give her publicity in USA she would treat both him and his daughter for nothing. (HIs daughter decamped after a few weeks.) Although Mrs Owen never made it into the US market, she always treated Potock with unaccustomed charm, calling him “cherub” and “angel”, according to his account of the months he spent in London in 1976 or 1977.
Roger Halhead: ₤3,000.
Neil Smith: ₤4,000 (with ₤3500 owing).
Ben O’Rourke: ₤3,000.
Maribel Steel: ₤2,500 (of an original ₤7,500 estimate, later dropped to ₤5,500.)
(₤7,500 seems to have been a favourite initial estimate, but flexible.)

What tended to happen (to Halhead, Potok, John Neil Smith and Maribel) was that after several months and no major demonstrable improvement, Mrs Owen would suggest a long break in treatment for patients to recover and get maximum benefit from the “shake-up” of their system caused by the cleansing bees’ venom, before returning, fortified and ready for another long stay with her. This return tended not to take place.

During my stay in Bromley, I was allowed to read a draft copy a new book by Julia Owen, which I believe was never published. As for the new draft MS, it was, like her two previous publications, Doctors without Shame and Clamouring at the Citadel, rambling and shrill and similarly reticent about specific biographical facts. Her main topics were, as usual, her special bee venom régime, diatribes against the medical profession, a catalogue of her impressive claims of success in treating arthritis, asthma, and, more recently, at the end of this long and under-recognised career, her alleged success with sight-impaired RP sufferers, on the path to blindness – which in the mid-1970s seemed to constitute her serious bid for greater recognition. Her ranting style was unmistakeable, as we shall glimpse in the BBC TV documentary.

So, you may ask, WHY did all you patients and families tolerate and INDULGE this woman?
The easy and predictable answer is: Because we are talking about the loss of one’s eyesight. No one else could offer any hope and if the treatment had worked it would have been both a miracle and a blessing!

Part 3 will cover the 1979 BBC TV Nationwide documentary on Mrs Owen and her treatment.

Favourites on this Blog – for Holiday Reading

Of the one hundred and eleven blogs posted here since 2008, these are the 16 that have attracted most attention. Unlike other more ephemeral blogs, the subject matter seems to remain of interest.

With my good wishes for the New Year.

General
1.
‘New Hope for Disempowered Women’

2.
‘The Fragmentation of Information in Wikipedia’

3.
‘Please dress up the Em dash’

4.
‘Global warming debate. 1’

5.
‘Global warming debate. 2’
‘Global Warming Controversy. Part 2. Global Warming Scepticism: Some Basic Data & Chronological Notes’

6.
‘Julia Owen and bee stings in Bromley’

7.
‘Julia Owen, Retinitis Pigmentosa, and the Media. Part 1’
(Part 2 will follow in the New Year.)

Languages

1.
Of 33 offerings on Translation and Interpreting topics, this item has captured most attention:
‘Translation 8. Fluency in foreign languages. The case of Dr Condoleezza Rice’
(See also ‘Translation. 30’.)

2.
‘Translation 32. David Bellos’s Revealing Book on Translation and the Meaning of Everything’

3.
‘Spanish Pronunciation in the Media’

Spain

1.
‘The European Union’s verdict on the Franco Régime in Spain (1939-1975)’

2.
‘Justo Gallego – the lone twentieth century Cathedral Builder’

India

1.
‘Contemporary India. 1. Basic Sources of Information’

2.
‘A Visit to Sathya Sai Baba’s ashram in October 2008’

3.
‘Sathya Sai Baba: Questionable Stories and Claims. Part 1’

4.
‘Fuzzy Dates in the Official Biography of Sathya Sai Baba. A Re-examination’

Translation 32. David Bellos’s Revealing Book on Translation and the Meaning of Everything. (Reposted)

(Originally posted on 10 November 2011, and clumsily deleted. Reposted 27 December)

It took a group of fifty scholars from twenty countries to produce the academic tome Translators Through History in 1995 (edited by Jean Delisle and Judith Woodsworth and co-published by John Benjamins and UNESCO. See this review by Alex Gross, with a list of eight other recommended works on translation history). That erudite and expensive collection of 345 pages now languishes on University library shelves, for the convenience of research use by a select minority of researchers.

Sixteen years later, an academic (Professor David Bellos) has distilled a distinguished career as university teacher, researcher and award-winning literary translator into 390 pages of multi-faceted views of “Translation” (and translators), whose title clearly indicates a desire to address a broad swathe of the educated public: Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything.
Within a few weeks of its publication on both sides of the Atlantic (Faber in USA and Penguin in UK), the general appeal of Bellos’s very original work has been convincingly demonstrated by a unanimously favourable number of independent reviewers (mostly from widely-circulated culturally prestigious newspapers). Here is the list of eleven reviews (plus a strategic intervention by David Bellos), in order of appearance, with some selected points of view which present flavours of the book:
8 September 2011: The Times Higher Educational Supplement. Matthew Reisz, ‘Derrida had a word for it.’
“At a graduate ceremony at Princeton University, where he is professor of French and Italian and comparative literature, David Bellos recalls “a rather plump, pink-faced parent who came up and started chatting. When I told him I was a translator, he said: ‘But a translation is never a substitute for the original, is it?’ Trotting out a piece of folk wisdom as if it were an important new truth! I was so annoyed that I went home and started writing a diatribe. That’s how the book started.”
[…]
“More generally, Bellos is keen to challenge academic as well as popular misconceptions about translation.”

10 September: The Economist. Loftily anonymous, as is their habit; also hurried, superficial and with errors but very favourable. A good review for the author and publisher to have in the bag.

13 September: The Independent. David Bellos, ‘How Google Translate Works’.
David Bellos posts a book extract about Machine Translation and high praise for Google Translate (with many critical and other comments from readers).

14 September, The Sunday Telegraph. Maureen Freely, ‘A Witty Look at the Dark Art of Translation’.
“Bellos seems to have no anger in him whatsoever. Even as he demolishes the myths of translation, he delights in its chequered past and its contemporary ubiquity.”

22 September: The Guardian. Michael Hofmann, ‘Is That a Fish in Your Ear? by David Bellos – review. An inquiry into the finer points of translation’.
He implores a section of his readers: “anyone with no interest in translation, please read David Bellos’s brilliant book.”

23 September: The Independent. Shaun Whiteside, ‘No word for fig? Have a banana’.
He refers to Edith Grossman’s recent “stout defence of the translator’s art, Why Translation Matters, to richly deserved acclaim” and confesses to envy for Bellos’s ability to
“entertain while getting difficult linguistic ideas across to the general reader.”

The September issue of The Literary Review, pp. 46-47.
Frederick Raphael, ‘Speaking in Tongues’. A short piece by the eminent novelist and screenwriter’.

1 October: The Spectator. Robert Chandler, ‘Art of Translation’
Chandler makes this distinction:
“This book fulfils a real need; there is nothing quite like it. Why Translation Matters, by Edith Grossman, is equally well written, but it is limited to the field of literary translation. Steven Pinker’s books about language have been highly praised, but they leave me wondering how closely the author has ever wrestled with any language other than English. And ‘Translation Studies’ as taught in universities is a highly theoretical discipline that is beyond the understanding of most practising translators — let alone of the general public.”

8 October: The Irish Times, Theo Dorgan, ‘Mind Your Language’.
“Bellos is a witty and perceptive writer, a provocateur in the best sense of the word. He is particularly enlightening on the linguistic protocols of the European Union – I had not known of what he calls the Basic Rule, originally laid down as article 248 of the Treaty of Rome, which stipulates that the treaty (now encompassing 24 languages for 27 member states) is “a single original” in each of those 24 languages.”

24 October: From the blt [Bible, Literature, Translation] group blog: JD Gayle,‘A Book Review: Is That A Fish In Your Ear?.
An interesting and very favourable review by a an academic and translator. Gayle adds a lengthy lobbying comment on Bellos’s “short shrift” for women, perhaps in deference to the recommendation of the adage “A review, to be worthwhile, must add something.” Gayle also gives us the information (from Bellos) that the paperback is due next year and will include corrections and amendments and that a French translation is in preparation.

28 October: The New York Times. Adam Thirlwell, ‘The Joyful Side of translation’.

5 November: The Australian. Weekend Review. Miriam Cosaic, ‘It’s not all Greek to the Translators’.

Note:
I also learned of the following three reviews through the excellent www.omnivore.com books and reviews website but unfortunately the links are broken by News Limited’s paywall in two cases and for unknown reasons for The Scotsman reference, so I cannot report on them.
10 September: The Times. Michael Binyon.
18 September: The Sunday Times. Robert Rowland Smith.

11 September: Jennie Erdal, The Scotsman on Sunday. Not only a broken link but this review was not even accessible through a direct search on The Scotsman website.

There is a common thread of strong approval running through this rich batch of early reviews: the very broad range of the coverage (variegated facets of Translation, many illuminated for the first time), the author’s engaging style and sense of humour, and his original and sometimes challenging views and questions about what Translation is. (Longer more specialised reviews will, as is customary, take more time to appear but they will undoubtedly provide further food for thought and discussion for translators and others with a close interest in Bellos’s stimulating research and conclusions on the nature and varieties of Translation activities.)

So Is That a Fish in Your Ear? is already well on the way to bestseller status (including Kindle and other e-book versions). Dr Bellos is to be warmly congratulated for significantly raising public awareness of this vital but often misunderstood activity, or group of activities (including Interpreting) and of its hierarchy of practitioners, from the foot soldiers and pedagogues to the élites engaged in international geopolitics and literary translation.

STOP PRESS: Bellos’s success with younger readers is now guaranteed: He has sensibly joined Twitter as D.Bellos@Cinoc123.

In conclusion I add my own very enthusiastic endorsement and gratitude for Davis Bellos’s excellent work and append a few personal comments from a translator’s point of view.

Highlights:

Bellos’s views on translation (the whole book).
His highlighting of Translators as a motley group and his attention to many of their roles.
The author’s agreeably light touch and humour, passim. He even plays with the Font styles of Chapter headings as well as the title of the book.
His emphasis on both practical and theoretical questions.
The welcome absence of detailed discussion of eminent academic theoretical linguists of the distant or very distant past such as de Saussure (p. 326), Whorf (remember the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?), Bloomfield, Chomsky and George Steiner. Although perhaps provocative, it is also deliberate, as Bellos himself makes clear at the end of the book:

“Readers familiar with translation studies may notice other omissions. Some of them are intentional. George Steiner’s After Babel is still in print, and my reasons for not commenting on Walter Benjamin’s essay, ‘The Task of the Translator’, can be found in Cambridge Literary review 3 (June 2010), pp. 194-206.” (I was unable to locate this.)
Elsewhere (page reference missing) Roman Jakobson is equally quickly passed over.

My favourite chapters:
Chapter 10. ‘ Global flows. Centre and Periphery in the Translation of Books’ (pp. 208-223)
Do not be put off by the title! The chapter deals in fascinating depth with the world translation publishing industry. You may be surprised at the revelations.
Chapter 21. ‘Ceci n’est pas une traduction: Language Parity in the European Union’ (pp. 237-249)
An inside view of one of the European Union’s key institutions. (Especially topical in the context of the current EU financial crisis.)

Perhaps Bellos’s conclusion to the chapter has a wider significance too in relation to the historic European Union venture: “The laudable aim of treating all languages of Europe as equal produces the unwanted but perhaps inevitable result that ECJ [the European Court of Justice] rulings are sometimes so pithy as to defy comprehension in any of them” (p. 249)

Chapter 23. ‘ The Adventures of Automated Language Translation Machines’ (pp. 256-267)
Bellos accords very high praise to the “ Google Translate” venture and makes a confidently optimistic forecast of its future trajectory.
(Still to be taken into account: Google’s undoubted high performance with some highly trafficked languages with huge corpora of data should be contrasted with its inevitably much less satisfactory results so far with less trafficked – but very important – languages like Chinese, Hindi and Arabic.)

Chapter 24. ‘A Fish in Your Ear? The Short History of Simultaneous Interpreting’ (pp. 268-282)
A fascinating in-depth portrait of this very specialised élite (crème de la crème) of the translating profession, for whose almost superhuman members Bellos has nothing but praise. More alarmingly, he also foreshadows a possible shortage of such specially equipped persons in the future, as you will find out if you buy the book.

On page 354, David Bellos admits to the following conscious omissions:
“the uses and pitfalls of translations in the military, in war zones and in hospitals. I plead ignorance. There is surely a lot to be learned from the courageous language mediators who work in those fields.”
I am sure that for future editions he will find collaborators to contribute material on these important themes, especially from the health and forensic fields. In Canada, Australia and USA, a significant body of expertise has been developed over recent decades.

I hope I have added something.

Postscript: For a note on Edith Grossman, see here.

The Australian’s interest in Contemporary India. Part 1.

On 10 December 2011, Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor of The Australian and a prominent reporter on Asian affairs of many years standing, gave an account of his latest visit to India where he has attended a conference in Kolkata on ‘The Asian Century’, sponsored by the University of Melbourne’s Australia India Institute.

In a blunt 1500 word article titled, ‘India’s rise as a superpower has China on edge’, Sheridan revisits several troubled aspects of China-India relations, as seen by four prominent spokesmen on Indian strategic matters.

Firstly, Sheridan comments on the two themes of the opening speech by M. K. Narayanan, the Governor of Kolkata (and once India’s national security adviser). “One was that Australia had nothing to be concerned about from India’s rise. […] The second notable theme was more blunt. China, he said, was a nation that did not observe international norms. This statement was neither controversial nor emotive. It was matter-of-fact.”

The second reference comes from his interview with Professor Gopalaswamy Parthasarathy, a former Indian ambassador to Australia and to Pakistan and current advisor to the Indian government on security matters. Sheridan reports that Parthasarathy told him that China is “today the greatest proliferator of nuclear weapons technology and missiles” by supplying Pakistan for forty years with “nuclear weapons designs and equipment for enriching uranium”.

Sheridan then visited two more Indian security experts, Ajai Sahni, editor of the South Asian Intelligence Review and director of the Institute for Conflict Management, and Praveen Swami, a strategic analyst for The Hindu newspaper. He relates the anecdotal responses of both experts to the question of possible Chinese involvement with the Maoist groups active in nine states of eastern India.

Sheridan’s final, and perhaps most important source of evidence of “China’s activities to contain or encircle India” is to be found in a recent book, China and India. Great Power Rivals, by the Hawaiian-based think tank scholar, Mohan Malik, whose thesis, according to Sheridan, is that “China is trying to stymie India’s rise”, not only by the nuclear proliferation but by selling arms to five of India’s largest neighbours and by racheting up its decades-long provocative behaviour on the China-India borders, and beyond.

The article ends with some further brief considerations on the relations between USA, India and Australia.

(Part 2 will examine other aspects of The Australian’s (and Sheridan’s) candid pro-India stance in recent years.)

The Durban Spinfest in Perspective. From today’s “Australian” newspaper

From the Cut and Paste section on page 13 of today’s “Australian”:

“This time it really is the last chance. Fred Pearce, New Scientist May 30 1992:
LAST chance to save the planet?
No single meeting can change the world. But the organisers of the Earth Summit, one of the largest gatherings ever of the tribal elders of Homo sapiens, want to do nothing less than change the direction of our economic development.

Channel 4 News, Britain, August 9, 2002:
MARK Easton: It’s being billed as the last chance to save the planet. Sixty-five thousand people from 174 countries meet in Johannesburg later this month for the second ever Earth Summit . . .

Juliette Jowit, New Zealand Herald, December 3, 2007
CLIMATE talks “last chance” to avoid catastrophe
World leaders will converge on Bali today for the start of negotiations which experts say could be the last chance to save the Earth from catastrophic climate change.

From the World Wildlife website, December 5 2008:
POZNAN provides last chance to curb climate change.
Humanity is approaching the last chance to prevent catastrophic climate change, according to WWF’s analysis of the latest climate science.

Louise Gray, The Telegraph, Britain:
COPENHAGEN summit last chance to save planet, Lord Stern
The Copenhagen summit is the world’s last chance to save the planet from “catastrophic” global warming, according to a major study led by Lord Stern of Brentford, the country’s leading authority on climate change.

Spero News November 27:
CHURCHES claim Durban conference is mankind’s last chance
Rev Dr Olav Fyske Tveit, who leads the World Council of Churches, says the upcoming climate conference in South Africa is mankind’s ‘last opportunity’ to address climate change.

Fiona Harvey in Durban The Guardian , December 7:
LORD Stern: rich nations should stop subsidising fossil fuel industry

Gavin Atkins on Asian Correspondent.com:
THE strangest thing about all this is that despite believing that it is now too late, several of these people are at the conference, and their items for discussion are not what to do before the end of the world.
Surely Nicholas Stern would be at home drowning himself in alcohol, or at least, making passionate love to strangers in lifts?
In fact, Stern is not only at the Durban conference, he holds a number of prominent positions at COP17 and is even offering people advice about cutting down the use of fossil fuels, none of which seem to involve avoiding these kinds of conferences.
Why cutting down fossil fuel usage is of any use while the end of the world is nigh must be anyone’s guess.”
*
And don’t forget the Mayan prediction for 2012 …

Hindi Acronyms are based on English phonetics

New legislation on FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) has been creating lively controversy in the Indian Parliament and in the streets. (See here and here.)

FDI is an official Hindi term but it is also pronounced as if it were an English acronym: F.D.I. – efdeeaaee. The same is true of all Indian acronyms, including those which are the initials of Hindi words (like BJP – beejepee – or RJD – aarjedee – below).

The following basic reference list of about 150 other Hindi (English) abbreviations which occur in the media may therefore be of use to those who follow Indian affairs from abroad. The interesting linguistic factor is, of course, that (like personal initials in Hindi, e.g. P. J. – Pee jay) they are based on the phonetics of English and the clear majority refer to English words, so once transliterated from the Devanagari script, they are recognisable as acronyms by English speakers. The meaning, or reference, of the acronyms, however, may need further investigation! It is evident that, given the nature of acronyms, Hindi speakers may be unaware of the English words represented, just as English speakers may not know, and, indeed, do not need to know, the exact constituents which have produced the acronyms, only the entity they refer to.
(The handful of glosses missing below will be supplied as soon as possible. Sooner if someone is kind enough to send them to me!)

['aaee' = I.] ['eee' is either ee [E] plus e [A], or e [A] plus ee [E]

aaeeaaeetee, IIT = Indian Inst of Technology
aaeeeees, IAS, Indian Administrative Service: (‘Bharateey prashaasnik sevaa’)
aaeeefes, IFS, Indian Foreign Service
aaeeensee, INC. Indian National Congress [Party](The leading member of the current Government coalition. (See yoopeee, UPA.)
aaeeesaaee, 1. ISI (Pakistan) Inter-Services Intelligence
aaeeesaaee, 2. ISI, Indian Statistical Institute
aaeeesoh, ISO International Standard Organisation
aaeeseeaaee, ICI, Imperial Chemical Industries
aaeeseesee, ICC, International Cricket Council (‘antarrashtreeyaa krikat parishad’)
aaeeseeyoo, ICU Intensive Care Unit

aarbeeaaee, RBI, Reserve Bank of India
aardeeaaee, RDI, Rural Development Institute
aarjedee, RJD, Rashtreeya Janata Dal (Bihar) National People’s Party
aarpeeaaee, RPI, Republican Party of India
aarteeaaee, RTI, Right to Information

beeaaeees, BIS, Bureau of Indian Studies
beeesef, BSF, Border Security Force
beejepee, BJP, Bharaateeya Janata Party
beeemsee, BMC, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation
beeesee, BSE, Bombay Stock Exchange
beeesef, BSF, Border Security Force (Seema Surakshaa Bal)
beeespee, BSP, Bahujan Samaj Party (Society of the Majority of the People. The leading party in U.P. The Majority People are the Dalits and others.)
beejepee, BJP Bhaarateeys Janata Party (Indian People’s Party)
beeseeseeaaee, BCCI, Board of Control for Cricket in India

deeem, DM, District Magistrate
deeemaaeesee, DMIC, Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor
deeemjee, DMG, Department of Mines and Geology
deeemke, DMK, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. The leading party of Tamil Nadu
deejeeseee, DGCA, Directorate General of Civil Aviation
deeseepee, DCP, Deputy Commissioner of Police
deeveedee, DVD

deeemaaeesee, DMIC, Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor
deeteesee, DTC, Delhi Transport Corporation

eaaeeseesee, AICC, All-India Congress Committee
ebeeseedee (jocular or satirical), ABCD, American-born confused Desi [Indian]
echaaivee, HIV
efdeeaaee, FDI, Foreign Direct Investment

eme, M.A. Master of Arts
endeee, NDA, National Democratic Alliance (The centre-right coalition)
endeeteevee (Indeeyaa), NDTV (India) New Delhi TV
esaaeetee, SIT, Students Islamic Trust
esspee, SP, Superintendent of Police

echdeesee, HDC, Higher Divisional Clerk
ee yoo, EU, European Union
eefespeee [ = e,ef…], AFSPA, Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act
eeteeef, ETF, Exchange-traded Fund
efaaeeaaee. FII, Foreign Institutional Investors
efdeeaaee, FDI, Foreign Direct Investment
efem, FM, Foreign Minister
effaaeeaar, FIR, (Police) First Information Report

elaaeesee, LIC, Life Insurance Corporation
eldeesee, LDC, Lower Divisional Clerk
elosee, LoC, Line of Control (in Kashmir)

em. phil., M.Phil. (Master of Philology)
emeee, MEA, Minister of External Affairs
emele, MLA, Member of the Legislative Assembly

emenes, MNS, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. Maharashtra Reformation Army. A political party.
empee, MP

enaaeee, NIA, National Investment Agency
enaaeesee, NIC, National Integration Council
enaaraaee, NRI, Non-Resident Indian
enaareejeees, NREGS, National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme
endeee, NDA, National Democratic Alliance
enemteebeeese, NMTBSA, Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association (The world famous lunch delivery “dabbawallas” of Mumbai)
enseeaarbee, NCRB, National Crime Records Bureau
enseeeeartee, NCERT, National Council of Educational Research & Training
enseepee, NCP, Nationalist Congress Party
enseepeearaaee, NCPRI, National Campaign for People’s Right to Information
ensseear, NCR, National Capital Region

esaaeebee, SIB, State Intelligence Bureau
esaaeeemaaaee, SIMI, Student Islamic Movement of India
esaaeetee, 1. SIT, Special Investigation Team
esaaeetee, 2. SIT, Students Islamic Trust
eseebeeaaee, SEBI, Securities Exchange Board of India
eseezed, SEZ, Special Economic Zone
esesaaee, SSI, Small-Scale Industries
espeeo, SPO, Special Police Officer
eteees, ATS, Anti-terrorism Squad
eteesee, ATC, Air Traffickers Association
jedeeyoo, JDU, Janata Dal United, (People’s Association United (Bihar)

jeepeeess, GPS [Sat Nav]
jepeesee, JPC, Joint Parliamentary Committee

obeesee, OBC, Other Backward Classes
oenjeesee, ONGC, Oil and National Gas Corporation

peeaaeeo, PIO, Person of Indian Origin
peeechdee, PhD, Doctor(ate) of Philosophy
peeele, PLA, People’s Liberation Army (China)
peeem, P.M.
peeoke, PoK, Pakistan-occupied Kashmir

seeaaeeaaee, CII, Confederation of Indian Industry
seeaares, 1. CRS, Catholic Relief Society
seeaares, 2. CRS, Congressional Research Service
seeaarpeeef, CRPF, Central Reserve Police Force
seebeeaaee, CBI, Central Bureau of Investigation
seebeesee, CBC [?]
seedee, CD
seeeeoh, CEO
seeem, CM, Chief Minister (State)
seepeeaaee, CPI, Communist Party of India
seepeeem, CPM, or CPI(M) seepeeaaeeem, Communist Party of India (Marxist)
seepeesee, CPC, Communist Party of China

seeseeteevee, CCTV
seeveesee, CVC, Central Vigilance Committee (against corruption & abuse of power)

teedeepee, TDP, Telugu Desham Party (Andra Pradesh)
teeoaaee, TOI (Times of India)
teetee, TT, train ticket inspector
toojee, 2G, The ongoing 2G Spectrum scandal

vaaeetoojee, Y2G [or vaay-] A recent Communications scandal
veeaaeepee, VIP (or ‘weep’)
veep, (or weep), VIP
veesee, VC, Vice Chancellor

yoo es, U.S. (USA)
yoopee, UP (Uttar Pradesh)
yoopeee, UPA, United Progressive Alliance (The ruling coalition)
yoopeees, UPS, [?]
yoopeesee, UPC, [?]

*

Translation 33. Free Internet Translation Software: The Contest between Google Translate and Microsoft’s BING Translator

Machine Translation (MT) software comes in many forms and in two specific categories: commercial, and free of charge. At the top end of the commercial offerings are sophisticated and expensive software tools used by professional freelance translators and translation companies in order to ease and speed up their laborious tasks. The name TRADOS is one of the most used. It offers packages costing from 600 to 2,500 Euros. At the lower commercial level there are many products costing between $60 and $120 for help with translating between the major European languages, or at least between English and those languages. For free Internet translation services, the current leader is Google Translate, closely followed by its recent challenger Microsoft’s BING Translator. Both produce fast but basic translations of all sorts of Internet material, in a very wide range of languages and language pairs. For a number of years, the earlier Internet leader was Altavista’s Babelfish. Under the Yahoo label, this free programme is still available and widely used but with the two younger competitors making fast progress with their more effective MT formulas, it is showing its age.

As a preliminary sample of MT, take the following absurdly easy test used by blog researchers comparing and rating ten budget software translation packages. From this site,
the references lead to this basic test, from Spanish to English.

“Abuela, ¿por qué tienes los ojos tan grandes?” Caperucita Roja preguntó. “Para que yo pueda ver mejor,” Dijo la abuela. “¡Oh, abuelita, ¿por qué tienes la boca tan grande?” “Para poder comerte mejor!” Entonces, la abuela salta de la cama.

They offer the following as a “Correct Translation” against which to compare the ten commercial contenders:
“Grandma, why do you have such big eyes?” Little Red Riding Hood asked. “So that I can see better.” the grandma said. “Oh, Grandma, why do you have such a big mouth?” “So I can eat better!” Then, the grandma jumps out of the bed.

For a description of the major three free Internet MT systems listed above and a judgement on their relative qualities, see John Yunker’s articles on the work of Ethan Shen, starting with this one and following the links).(Shen pronounces Google Translate as the overall winner.)

Another strong recommendation of Google’s quality and breadth of coverage as well as a clear explanation of the Google method is to be found in Chapter 23 of David Bellos’s recent wide-ranging book on Translation, Is That a Fish in Your Ear – by now a runaway bestseller.

The chapter offers a potted history of MT and expresses Bellos’s very positive view of the advances in MT achieved by Google, emphasising its novel approach to the task of MT. In a recent article, Bellos offers an edited version of pages 263-266 of that chapter (‘The Adventure of Automated Language Translation Machines’) in which, in characteristic manner, he succinctly explains the complex Google system to us:

“Using software originally developed in the 1980s by researchers at IBM, Google has created an automatic translation tool that is unlike all others. It is not based on the intellectual presuppositions of early machine translation efforts – it isn’t an algorithm designed only to extract the meaning of an expression from its syntax and vocabulary.
“In fact, at bottom, it doesn’t deal with meaning at all. Instead of taking a linguistic expression as something that requires decoding, Google Translate (GT) takes it as something that has probably been said before.
“It uses vast computing power to scour the internet in the blink of an eye, looking for the expression in some text that exists alongside its paired translation.
“The corpus it can scan includes all the paper put out since 1957 by the EU in two dozen languages, everything the UN and its agencies have ever done in writing in six official languages, and huge amounts of other material, from the records of international tribunals to company reports and all the articles and books in bilingual form that have been put up on the web by individuals, libraries, booksellers, authors and academic departments.
“Drawing on the already established patterns of matches between these millions of paired documents, Google Translate uses statistical methods to pick out the most probable acceptable version of what’s been submitted to it.”

Although he admits that Google Translate results are not always satisfactory, Bellos forecasts a rosy future for MT and for Google in particular as it improves and adds to its fabulous corpora in 58 language.

To give an idea of the standard of translation achieved by Google, and to give a glimpse of what Professor Bellos’s enthusiasm is founded on, I propose to offer and examine samples of translations into English from four languages. The additional factor is that BING (which offers 2-way translations to and from 37 languages as compared with the 58 Google pairs cited by Professor Bellos) will be subjected to the same tests, as evidence of this battle of the Free to Ether Translation Titans. (Results from Yahoo’s Babelfish are offered at the end of the piece.)

Firstly (in the current article) I present and compare translations from French and Spanish into English. In a later blog article I hope to offer similar material from Russian and Hindi (probably transliterated to fit in the WordPress system). From these disparate examples, we may be able to discern the strengths of the two software programmes and some of the problems which still remain to be overcome in the search for workable and useful translations into and out of all printed languages.

By way of Prologue to the proposed comparisons, if we try the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ test sample on Google and BING, we get the following results.

Google Translate:
“Grandma, why are your eyes so big?” Little Red Riding Hood said. “So that I can see better,” said the grandmother. “Oh, Grandma, why your mouth is so big?” “To eat better!” Then the grandmother jumps out of bed.

There are two unsatisfactory translations here:
why your mouth is so big?” “To eat better!”

BING Translator:
“Grandmother, why you have such large eyes?” Little Red Riding Hood asked. “So that I can see better,” said the grandmother. “Oh, grandmother, why have the big mouth?!” “To be able to eat better!” Then Grandma jumps out of bed.

Again, two unsatisfactory translations, and for the same segment:
why have the big mouth?!” and “To be able to eat better!”

Both Google and BING completely miss the agglutinated Spanish pronoun in “comer” + “-te” (“to eat YOU better”), but, IMHO, Google is marginally in front of BING in the second listed infelicity.

Now let us move on to a more challenging test of MT ability. For this I have chosen short segments from French and Spanish Wikipedia on a topic of recent interest.

1.
French Wikipedia: ‘Crise financière mondiale débutant en 2007’
“La crise financière mondiale qui a commencé en 2007 est une crise financière marquée par une crise de liquidité et parfois par des crise [sic: = crises] de solvabilité tant au niveau des banques que des Etats, et une raréfaction du crédit au niveau des entreprises. Amorcée en juillet 2007, elle trouve son origine dans le dégonflement de bulles de prix (dont la bulle immobilière américaine des années 2000) et les pertes importantes des établissements financiers provoquées par la crise des subprimes. C’est la crise la plus grave de l’histoire des bourses de valeurs, après celle de 1873, découlant de la crise bancaire de mai 1873.
“La crise financière de l’automne 2008 amplifie le mouvement et provoque une chute des cours des marchés boursiers et la faillite de plusieurs établissements financiers. Pour éviter une crise systémique, les Etats doivent intervenir et sauver de nombreuses banques ce qui provoquera une crise de la dette publique en Islande d’abord puis en Irlande. Par ailleurs, elle provoque une récession touchant l’ensemble de la planète. Les finances publiques ont été lourdement sollicitées pour résoudre cette crise. Le déficit public s’est creusé dans de nombreux pays, après un recul du produit intérieur brut mondial de 2,2% en 2009.”
(200 words)

(Points for attention are italicised.)

Google:
“The global financial crisis that began in 2007 is a financial crisis marked by a liquidity crisis and sometimes by solvency crisis at both banks of the States, and a credit crunch at the company level. Began in July 2007, it has its origins in the bursting of price bubbles (including the U.S. housing bubble of the 2000s) and losses of financial institutions caused by the subprime crisis. This is the worst crisis in the history of stock exchanges, after that of 1873, arising from the banking crisis of May 1873.
The financial crisis of autumn 2008 amplifies the movement and causes a fall in equity markets and the collapse of several financial institutions. To avoid a systemic crisis, governments must step in and save many banks which will cause a crisis of public debt in Iceland first and then in Ireland. Moreover, it causes a recession in the entire world. Public finances were heavily used to solve this crisis. The deficit has widened in many countries, after a decline in global GDP by 2.2% in 2009.” (177 words)

Microsoft:

“The global financial crisis that began in 2007 is a financial crisis marked by a crisis of liquidity and solvency crisis sometimes both at the level of the banks of the States, and a scarcity of credit at the level of enterprises. Started in July 2007, it finds its origin in the bursting of bubbles of awards (including the the 2000 US housing bubble) and losses of financial institutions caused by the subprime crisis. It is the most serious crisis in the history of stock exchanges, after 1873, arising from the banking crisis of May 1873.
The financial crisis of autumn 2008 amplifies the movement and causes a collapse in stock market prices and the bankruptcy of several financial institutions. To prevent a systemic crisis, States should intervene and save many banks which will cause a crisis of public debt in Iceland first and then in Ireland. In addition, it causes a recession affecting the entire planet. Public finances were heavily sought to resolve this crisis. The public deficit widened in many countries, after a decline of 2.2% in 2009 world gross domestic product.” (169 words)

These are worthy attempts, useful to the general reader looking for a gist, and produced, on demand, in a few seconds. All that is needed to make them more reliable is shown below (in bold type).

Google, improved:

“The global financial crisis that began in 2007 is a financial crisis marked by a liquidity crisis and sometimes by solvency crises for both banks and States, and a credit crunch at the company level. Beginning in July 2007, it has its origins in the bursting of price bubbles (including the U.S. housing bubble of the 2000s) and serious losses by financial institutions caused by the subprime crisis. This is the worst crisis in the history of stock exchanges, after that of 1873, arising from the banking crisis of May 1873.
The financial crisis of autumn 2008 amplifies the movement and causes a fall in equity markets and the collapse of several financial institutions. To avoid a systemic crisis, governments had to step in and save many banks, which was to cause a crisis of public debt first in Iceland and then in Ireland. Moreover, it caused a recession in the entire world. Public finances were heavily used to solve this crisis. The deficit has widened in many countries, after a decline in global GDP of 2.2% in 2009.” (177 words)

BING, improved:

“The global financial crisis that began in 2007 is a financial crisis marked by a crisis of liquidity and sometimes by solvency crises both at the level of the banks and of the States, and by a scarcity of credit at the company level. Commencing in July 2007, it has its origin in the bursting of price bubbles (including the 2000 US housing bubble) and the serious losses of financial institutions caused by the subprime crisis. It is the most serious crisis in the history of stock exchanges, after the 1873 crisis, arising from the banking crisis of May 1873.
The financial crisis of autumn 2008 amplifies the movement and causes a collapse in stock market prices and the bankruptcy of several financial institutions. To prevent a systemic crisis, States had to intervene and save many banks, which was to cause a crisis of public debt first in Iceland and then in Ireland. In addition, it caused a recession affecting the entire planet. Public finances were heavily drawn on to resolve this crisis. The public deficit widened in many countries, after a decline of 2.2% in world gross domestic product in 2009.” (169 words)

2.
Spanish Wikipedia: ‘Crisis económica de 2008-2011’

“Por crisis económica de 2008 a 2011 se conoce a la crisis económica mundial que comenzó ese año, originada en los Estados Unidos. Entre los principales factores causantes de la crisis estarían los altos precios de las materias primas, la sobrevalorización del producto, una crisis alimentaria mundial y energética, una elevada inflación planetaria y la amenaza de una recesión en todo el mundo, así como una crisis crediticia, hipotecaria y de confianza en los mercados. La causa raíz de toda crisis según la Teoría austríaca del ciclo económico es una expansión artificial del crédito. En palabras de Jesús Huerta de Soto «esta crisis surge de la expansión crediticia ficticia orquestada por los bancos centrales, y que ha motivado que los empresarios invirtieran donde no debían”.
“La crisis iniciada en el 2008 ha sido señalada por muchos especialistas internacionales como la “crisis de los países desarrollados”, ya que sus consecuencias se observan fundamentalmente en los países más ricos del mundo.” (159 words)

(Points for attention are italicised.)

Google

In economic crisis from 2008 to 2011 is known to the world economic crisis that began that year, which originated in the United States. Among the main factors causing the crisis would be the high prices of raw materials, the overvaluation of the product, a global food and energy crisis, high inflation and the threat of global recession around the world and a credit crisis trust and mortgage markets. The root cause of all crises as the Austrian theory of business cycle is an artificial expansion of credit. In the words of Jesus Huerta de Soto “this crisis arises from the fictitious credit expansion orchestrated by central banks, and has motivated entrepreneurs to invest where there were”.
The crisis that began in 2008 has been noted by many international experts as the “crisis of the developed countries”, since its effects are observed mainly in the richer countries of the world. (150 words)

Microsoft

The global economic crisis that began that year, originating in the United States is known by economic crisis of 2008 to 2011. Among the major causative factors of the crisis would be high prices of raw materials, the sobrevalorización of the product, energy and global food crisis, high global inflation and the threat of a recession around the world, as well as a loan, mortgage crisis and confidence in the markets. Caused by following every crisis according to the Austrian business cycle theory is an artificial expansion of credit. In the words of Jesus Huerta de Soto “this crisis stems from the fictional credit expansion orchestrated by central banks, and that has motivated entrepreneurs to invest where wrong”.
The crisis which began in 2008 has been brought by many international experts as the ‘crisis of developed countries’, already that its consequences are observed mainly in countries richest in the world. (150 words)

Google, improved

The economic crisis of 2008 to 2011 is the title given to the world economic crisis that began that year and originated in the United States. Among the main factors causing the crisis would be the high prices of raw materials, the overvaluation of the product, a global food and energy crisis, high inflation and the threat of global recession around the world and a crisis in credit, mortgages and market confidence. The root cause of all crises according to the Austrian theory of the business cycle is an artificial expansion of credit. In the words of Jesus Huerta de Soto “this crisis arises from the fictitious credit expansion orchestrated by central banks, and has motivated entrepreneurs to invest where they should not have done“.
The crisis that began in 2008 has been noted by many international experts as the “crisis of the developed countries”, since its effects are observed mainly in the richer countries of the world. (158 words)

BING, improved

The global economic crisis that began in 2008, originating in the United States, is known as the economic crisis of 2008 to 2011. Among the major causative factors of the crisis would be high prices of raw materials, the overvaluation of the product, a global food and energy crisis, high global inflation and the threat of a recession around the world, as well as a loan crisis, a mortgage crisis and loss of confidence in the markets. The root cause of every crisis, according to the Austrian business cycle theory is an artificial expansion of credit. In the words of Jesus Huerta de Soto “this crisis stems from the fictional credit expansion orchestrated by central banks, and that has motivated entrepreneurs to invest where they should not have done.”
The crisis which began in 2008 has been labelled by many international experts as the ‘crisis of developed countries’, since its consequences are observed mainly in the richest countries in the world. (161 words)

So, on the above evidence, both of these translation tools, Google and BING, offer a very useful BASIC – and lightning fast – FREE service for French and Spanish to English to millions of Internet users. (The situation of English INTO French and Spanish needs separate attention and may be dealt with in a future blog.)

For comparison, here are the results obtained Yahoo’s Babelfish with its updated but ageing technology. Note the higher number of italicised items, and their nature.

1. French to English:
“The world financial crisis which started in 2007 is a financial crisis marked by a crisis of liquidity and sometimes by crisis of solvency as well on the level of the banks as of the States, and a rarefaction of the credit on the level of the companies. Started in July 2007, it finds its origin in the deflation of bubbles of price (of which the American real estate bubble of the years 2000) and important losses of the financial institutions caused by the crisis of the subprimes. C’ is the most serious crisis of l’ history of the purses of values, after that of 1873, rising from the banking crisis of May 1873. The financial crisis of l’ autumn 2008 amplifies the movement and causes a fall of the courses of the stockmarkets and the bankruptcy of several financial institutions. To avoid a systemic crisis, the States must intervene and save many banks what will cause a crisis of the national debt in Iceland d’ access then in Ireland.
In addition, it causes a recession concerning l’ together of planet. Public finances were heavily requested to solve this crisis. The public deficit s’ is dug in many countries, after a retreat of the world gross domestic product of 2,2% in 2009.”

2. Spanish to English

“By economic crisis from 2008 to 2011 it is known world-wide the economic crisis that began that year, originated in the United States. Between the main factors causes of the crisis they would be the high prices of the raw materials, the sobrevaluation of the product, world-wide an nourishing crisis and energetics, a high planetary inflation and the threat of a recession anywhere in the world, as well as a credit, hypothecating crisis and of confidence in the markets. The root cause of all crisis according to the Austrian Theory of the economic cycle is an artificial expansion of the credit. In words of Jesus Kitchen garden of Grove “this crisis arises from the fictitious credit expansion orchestrated by the central banks, and that have motivated that the industralists invested where they did not have”. The crisis initiated in the 2008 has been indicated by many international specialists like the “crisis of the developed countries”, since their consequences are observed essentially in the richest countries of the world.”
*

In a later blog, passages will be selected from two languages which are “more foreign” to English speakers, and for which less raw material has been available to the colossal Internet data banks on which Google Translate and Microsoft Translator rely for their lightning fast searches. The samples will be taken from Russian and Hindi, languages whose structures differ more basically from English than its familiar French and Spanish cousins.

Da svidanya. Phir milenge

(For a lighter and enlightening finish to this long essay, Google’s own explanation of its system is to be found here.)

Julia Owen, Retinitis Pigmentosa, and the Media. Part 1

Note
Apitherapy has a long tradition (especially in continental Europe and Canada) and there is a sizeable bibliography on it. As a preliminary source, see the relevant Wikipedia article and its External Links. Also the published work of Michael Simics.

Media Acclaim and Promotion 1975

Mrs Julia Owen had already spent decades studying apitherapy and treating arthritis, dermatitis and other ailments with bee venom. She had also self-published three promotional books in the mid-1960s. Following her return to UK from Australia in 1972, as a sexagenarian anxious for greater public recognition of her skills, she appears to have decided to concentrate on the much more emotionally appealing treatment of Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP), a hereditary disease leading to blindness. Although I cannot trace any UK media articles about her in the early 1970s, this is mainly because such material is not available on the Internet. The fact is that Owen must have stirred up public interest in the years 1972-1975, possibly through her habit of encouraging British RP patients to spread the news of their claimed cures, especially to the local newspapers. Without some sort of similar growing publicity, there would have been no incentive for journalist Ena Kendall to have researched Owen’s controversial bee sting work in 1975 and no incentive either for the prestigious UK Sunday paper The Observer to have published Kendall’s nuanced but basically favourable article on 16 February 1975 in its Sunday Magazine under the title ‘Can Bee Stings Cure Blindness?’ (pp. 25-7).

This investigative article filled in some much-needed background to Mrs Owen’s life and work (supplied mainly by her) and focussed on her claimed success in the newish venture of treating RP sufferers, although the research included comments on her preceding success with arthritis and other conditions.

Kendall begins her article with brief but enthusiastic testimonials from three British RP sufferers (including an unnamed barrister) who claim that in a brief time Mrs Owen had improved their condition. Kendall also reveals the protracted antagonism between Owen and the orthodox medical profession by quoting her objection to medical examination of her (treated and allegedly cured) RP patients on the basis that such tests would be harmful and “…These patients can now see beautifully … what more proof can they want?” We are then offered the dissenting opinion of a consultant ophthalmologist that there is not only no evidence of cures of RP, but that the patients’ fleeting subjective conviction of improvement is a documented psychological phenomenon. He also adds: “One doesn’t want to raise hopes among people going blind.”

Mrs Owen then offers Kendall some sketchy biographical details: Her Austrian father and grandfather had been medical practitioners of bee therapy. She had come to London after the war, and settled a few years later in Bromley, a prosperous city 15 miles south of London. For 20 years she treated “people with arthritis and kindred complaints”, before emigrating with her second husband (presumably Mr Owen) to Australia between 1966 and 1972. (Details of the Australian sojourn and any healing work carried out in that country would be useful for this jigsaw biography with so many pieces missing. More interesting would be ANY details of her Austrian name, the identities of her apitherapy practitioner family and her work until 1947, aged 39). All we are told is that she is 67, married an Englishman (from Staffordshire) before WWII and that Mr Owen was her second husband and died in 1972.)

So, although Owen had used bee venom for 48 years to treat “arthritic and rheumatic diseases, skin afflictions …” etc., now, “through pressure of work, she concentrates on blind people and […] asthmatics”. As for the treatment itself, “Bee venom works on the glands. You find out which gland is limping. You clear this gland and the pain disappears. With retinitis pigmentosa I dehydrate the pigments, a form of fungus of the eye. The treatment for arthritis can take eighteen months to two years.”

As for the treatment itself, which Kendall is allowed to witness during an afternoon session, Owen claims to use specially bred bees fed on a secret mixture of fermented herbs. On treatment day she selects the bees she will need, possibly up to ten per patient, and pinches them behind the head to subdue them and make them more manageable and finally applies them to the patient’s head, neck and back [and sometimes hands]. The stings are left in for up to two hours for maximum effect. The article ends with the following triumphalist self-promotion by Julia:
“I’ve got healing bees.” “Darling, it is a heaven. You have a blind person coming in and you put your arm around her and say: ‘Don’t worry, darling. You will be seeing.’ It is the most wonderful thing on earth to give somebody back his sight. It is beautiful for me because I beat the best men in the land.”

The above alone would explain why Ena Kendall’s report in such a widely read and respected British newspaper attracted immediate attention from many RP sufferers and their families in UK and abroad. It would also show why the article was instrumental in many of these patients coming to see Mrs Owen in the following three years (including the artist and writer Andrew Potok, who has described his treatment and reactions in great (and very useful) detail in his memoir Ordinary Daylight). But in addition to the details already summarised, the article also introduces two celebrity testimonials, which further strengthen readers’confidence in Mrs Owen’s miraculous abilities. One is the mention of a contemporary British celebrity actor, Jack Warner, who is quoted as saying that Mrs Owen was able to help him with a severe arthritic condition which orthodox medicine had not been able to treat. There is even an appealing photograph of the avuncular Warner standing behind (a rather stern) Mrs Owen, with his hands on her shoulders.

The other testimonial is longer and may have had an even stronger impact on some readers, particularly on RP sufferers, since it appears to be freely and enthusiastically delivered by a consultant doctor at the famous Royal London Homeopathic Hospital (presumably to Ena Kendall). The consultant’s name is given as Dr Lambert Mount (see Google) “who is fully qualified in orthodox medicine and has made a study of natural treatments such as homeopathy, acupuncture and hydrotherapy.” As quoted by Kendall, this eminent specialist’s endorsement of Owen’s whole therapeutic practice runs to about a hundred words. This is the part which RP patients and their families would have found most encouraging:
“She’s getting remarkably good results with retinitis pigmentosa, sometimes within a week or even two or three days. She has cured arthritis successfully. […]”
“The balance of the glands is affected by her therapy, which is a deep systemic treatment, affecting the functioning of the whole body, and there’s a change in the metabolic reactions. She is producing the most outstanding cures I’ve seen in fringe, unorthodox medicine.”

A reminder: it seems very prudent to distinguish between the use of apitherapy for arthritis and its use for Retinitis Pigmentosa.

Postscript:

Having a teenage daughter with recently diagnosed RP, I was one of the many who tried to contact Mrs Owen in early 1975 via The Observer after seeing Ena Kendall’s article. In a letter dated 2 June 1975, the Secretary to the Editor of the Observer Magazine wrote to warn me that the response had been so heavy that Mrs Owen had stated that she was fully booked for three years. (Mrs Owen had finally succeeded in attracting attention on a large scale.) Persevering with my request a year later I was pleased to receive a lengthy reply from Ena Kendall herself expressing sympathy and revealing Mrs Owen’s home address. That much is anecdotal. Her further helpful comments to me will be of interest to some readers as they reveal her favourable opinion of Mrs Owen and her serious personal concern at being responsible for many people contacting Mrs Owen, not all them satisfied clients, to her apparent surprise. If Ms Kendall reads this I hope she will not object to my reprinting her words for which I thank her. If only she could add her view of later developments in 1978!

“When I first interviewed Mrs Owen and the group of people she was then treating for retinitis pigmentosa, I was very impressed, and still am, in many ways, although her methods, as applied to the larger cross-section of people who have now been in touch with her by no means meet with success in every, or even in most cases. In the past 14 months I have heard from people who cannot speak highly enough of her and of the improvements she has brought about in their sight, and others who say that they have not had any tangible improvement. It is only fair to say that many people have gone to her whose sight is in such a bad way in any case that the basics on which she has to work have been destroyed, and she cannot put these back. She is extremely fond of children, and claims her best results with young people because, she says, they have not been subjected to as many drugs as adults have — and by this she means any drug for any sort of ailment.

“She refuses to let anyone else into the secret of her treatment, despite repeated pressure from doctors, scientists and just ordinary people. If she would allow her patients to be examined or studied in any way, perhaps it would be discovered why some appear to react well and others not at all to her bees. Another point about her treatment is that it may go on for months, and she insists on people staying nearby, so it can be a very expensive business.”
*

(For more background to this thread, see:
‘Julia Owen and bee stings in Bromley’ and
‘Helga Barnes plus bee therapy leads to Julia Owen’ .)

(In Part 2 of Julia Owen, Retinitis Pigmentosa and the Media, the rest of the available 1978-1979 media articles and broadcasts will be listed, with some commentary, especially on the decisive 1979 BBC TV ‘Nationwide’ programme by Roger Cook, which must have mortified Ena Kendall.)

Helga Barnes plus bee therapy leads to Julia Owen

The same two Internet Search items will also lead you straight to Andrew Potok – but I am getting ahead of myself.

Until recently I had assumed that (prior to my 2008 blog, Julia Owen and bee stings in Bromley) the 1975 Observer article by Ena Kendall was the major written source of information about Julia Owen (apart from her two out-of print self-published books on her struggle against orthodox medicine for recognition, both highly subjective).

Extensive Internet searches failed to reveal much of value, except that apitherapy has a respectable pedigree. One intriguing little item to add to the hazy biography of Mrs. Owen is available in two brief wire articles in Canadian newspapers on 24 November 1960. In the Ottawa Citizen version of a Reuters dispatch from London we are informed that Dr Joseph Saine, a Canadian medical entrepreneur, gave a Press Conference to London journalists on his plans to invest one million pounds to set up a chain of clinics in Canada for developing and applying Julia Owens’s bee venom formula to treat arthritis, skin diseases and nervous disorders – the conditions that Owen had initially become famous for treating. The note goes on to state that the journalists walked out of the Conference when Dr Saine failed to satisfy them with his responses about the characteristics of bee venom. Nothing further was heard of the project.

My recent very belated discovery of Andrew Potok’s Ordinary Daylight. Portrait of an Artist Going Blind, offers a fascinating detailed account of a patient undergoing three months of bee sting treatment from Mrs Owen (in 1976 or 1977) in a desperate attempt to save his failing sight. The book was originally published in 1980 and in paperback in 1981 and has recently (2003) been reissued with a new Foreword and Afterword. A large part of the memoir is about Potok’s experiences with Owen, although other relevant aspects of his life are also interwoven. The reason Search Engines have not picked up the connection is entirely due to Mrs Owen’s bullying modus operandi, threatening to sue left, right and centre against any criticism of her work. To avoid this eventuality, Andrew (or Andy, who also has a Facebook page) sensibly changed all the names, including, naturally, that of Owen, who becomes Helga Barnes, as well as the name of her chauffeur and minder Geoffrey (Dirkson here), and even the names of Owen’s two self-justifying books, which reincarnate as Disgrace in the Clinic and Storming the Distant Tower.

In the 300-page 2003 paperback, there is only one belated mention of the name Julia Owen in the final pages of the Afterword, where Potok explains that his original publisher’s lawyers had insisted on the changes.

So although Googling Helga Barnes + bee therapy will produce some new information on Julia Owen, you will really have to buy yourself a copy to find out all that Potok reveals about Owen’s modus operandi: the pain of the stings, bravely borne because of his initial belief that his eyesight was improving; her paranoia, hectoring, ranting, and control tactics. And the eventual realisation that her methods were futile for him, a decision his similarly-afflicted daughter took a couple of weeks to make.

You will also be enlightened by Potok’s other investigative activities during his long “confinement” in London, interviewing medical experts on RP and bee venom, and tracking down the prominent homeopathic doctor who so strongly recommended Julia Owen’s work to the journalist Ena Kendall in 1975, whose article initiated Owen’s final flurry of activity related to RP.

And, although much needs to be added to flesh out Julia Owen’s scanty biography and antecedents (generations of Austrian apitherapists according to her), one thing is certain: Roger Cook’s BBC TV Nationwide programme on Julia Owen’s activities (3 January 1979), and notably her own self-indulgent contribution to it, had a strong impact on Mrs Owen’s activities. After a long career, 1978-1979 seems to have been both the zenith and nadir of her mentions in the media.

PS
Potok’s latest book is A Matter of Dignity: Changing the World of the Disabled.