In November’s Lancet, editor Dr Richard Horton has liberated his esteemed medical journal from the shackles of science by inviting us to resurrect Karl Marx as the saviour of medicine. His paean to Marx is a confusing blancmange of naïve romanticism and sophomoric cliché. Marxism, he pleads un-ironically, offers a ‘critique of society’, a ‘method of analysis’, a ‘call to engage’, and more than a legacy of famine, genocide and failed states.