Late Thursday night, I posted a full-out rant about what I considered to be an incredibly unfair and stupid generalization of the bad behavior of a single surgeon to an overblown and hysterical indictment of medical students, doctors, and surgeons by a fellow ScienceBlogger, posted on his own blog and on Feministe. Fellow ScienceBloggers Mark Hoofnagle and PalMD posted similar criticism, all of which, in my humble opinion (or IMHO, in Internet-speak) were justified. One thing I didn’t mention was that I debated for a while whether or not to post my criticism, because the reputation and previous typical online behavior of the blogger in question, PhysioProf, were such that what I expected back was an all-out, profanity-laden counterattack. At the time I wrote my rant, quite frankly, I wasn’t sure indulging my anger was worth having to deal with the inevitable nastiness that at the time I predicted to be the likely fallout of such an all-out frontal attack on PP’s idiotic comments. Indeed, I partially wrote it on Wednesday night and held off for a while, at which point I decided to finish it and post it.

Surprisingly, the fallout was completely different than what I expected. The blogger in question, PhysioProf, has issued an apology–of sorts. It’s a grudging and seemingly half-hearted apology, but an apology, nonetheless. My sense of fairness demands that I recognize it and link to it. There are, however, two aspects of this that I’d like to address briefly.

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