Author information from the last article
Ketil Slagstad er postdoktor ved Institut für Geschichte der Medizin und Ethik in der Medizin, Charité Berlin, Tyskland.
Articles by Ketil Slagstad
Puberty suppression
- Atle Fretheim,
- Anne Kveim Lie,
- Ketil Slagstad
14.03.2025:
Political and medical decisions to restrict access to puberty blockers for transgender adolescents ignore the most important primary outcome measure. Health authorities in Norway and several other countries have recently tightened access to puberty blockers for transgender adolescents (1). This is a...
16.05.2019:
Hans Asperger has been portrayed as an opponent of the Nazi regime under which he served. Historical research has now shown that he was instead a well-adapted cog in the machine of a deadly regime. He deliberately referred disabled children to the clinic Am Spiegelgrund, where he knew that they were...
Democracy dies in darkness
- Ketil Slagstad
25.03.2019:
A healthy society is characterised by a strong civic culture. As doctors, we are responsible also for the health of the body politic. Medicine is politics. Per Fugelli wrote: 'Health equals biology x culture x politics squared' (1), p. 14). Policy design is not exclusively reserved for parliamentary...
The medicine between the lines
- Ketil Slagstad
26.11.2018:
Borders, scribbles, yellow highlighting, footnotes, tables of contents, fonts, illustrations, comments fields and design are also medicine. Reading an old book full of underscoring and scribbles can be quite irritating. On the other hand, borders, notes in the margin, drawings, pictures and yellow...
Not both genders, but all genders.
- Ketil Slagstad
22.11.2018:
Biologically speaking, we all fall somewhere along a spectrum of gender, of which male and female represent the extreme ends. Authoritarian heads of government repudiate biological science in order to appease religious and conservative voters. Gender theorists and historians have long argued for how...
The power of diagnosis
- Anne Kveim Lie,
- Ketil Slagstad
11.06.2018:
The new diagnosis of gender incongruence is a recognition of the right of transgender persons to decide for themselves who they want to be. Our understanding of gender and gender identity is changing, in Norway and internationally. The disappearance of the 'gender identity disorders' diagnostic...
Mediated realities
- Ketil Slagstad
17.04.2018:
There is no reason for health journalism to be less critical than other forms of journalism. A meta-analysis investigating the efficacy of antidepressant drugs for acute, moderate to severe depression found that all drugs worked better than placebo (1). The study attracted huge attention both here...
The archive is everywhere
- Ketil Slagstad
22.01.2018:
The archive has been, is and will remain a vital resource in the production of medical knowledge. We simply need to open our eyes to it. What is an archive? One's thoughts tend to turn to monumental library buildings with acres of shelves, rolling ladders and row upon row of dusty, leather-bound...