Caroline Richmond: formidable science journalist, quack busting campaigner, and obituarist

bmj;384/jan25_1/q163/FAF1faThe 1987 Christmas edition of The BMJ featured a hilarious spoof by the outspoken and feisty medical journalist Caroline Richmond, who loved bright clothes and huge coloured spectacles. Her leaflet attributed the obesity epidemic to bright clothes and claimed that undyed clothes had “cured or improved” hyperactive children.But this was not just a bit of seasonal fun. Richmond wanted to test public susceptibility. Her fear was justified. People wrote to her about their bright clothes allergies. Action Against Allergies even put Richmond’s leaflet, in all good faith, on its website—even though it came from the “Dye Related Allergies Bureau (DRAB), a subsidiary of the Food Additives Research Team (FART).”This was the time, Richmond said, when pseudo-allergies to food and the environment were commonplace. She added, “In extreme cases patients decided they were ‘totally allergic to the 20th century,’ and, at huge expense, went to live in hermetically sealed bubbles in…
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