separate Acts of Parliament that call for it? I’ve counted ‘em myself.”
“Well, I hope I’m not doing down the national Exchequer,” I said anxiously. I knew the penalties for careless certification from a chilly little notice issued by the General Medical Council. Mistakenly entitling an applicant for a bottle of orange juice to a free pair of surgical boots might land me in the local Assizes. “I also seem to be prescribing about twice as many bottles of medicine as are therapeutically necessary.”
“Don’t worry, lad. A citizen’s bodily contentment for half a pint of coloured water is cheap at the price for any Government. Anyway, once the public’s got the idea in their heads that something does them good you’ll never get it out – whether it’s medicine, milk drinks, or meat extracts, which as you know consist of eighty per cent flavouring with no food value whatever and twenty per cent salt to save them from the putrefaction they so richly deserve.”
Dr Farquarson started filling his insanitary-looking pipe.
“The trouble with this generation is that its environment’s outstripping its intelligence. Look at the village idiot – a hundred years ago he sat contentedly on his bench outside the village inn. Someone occasionally gave him a little beer, and someone occasionally gave him a little hoeing. He never got in his own way or anyone else’s. But what happens today? He’s got to cope with pedestrian crossings, income-tax, football pools, national insurance, welfare workers, and God knows what. As he can’t, he either plagues his doctor as a neurotic or they put him inside. Another fifty years and anyone without a working knowledge of nuclear physics will be certified as mentally defective. Oh, it’ll be a happy day when there’s more of us inside than out. But at the moment the job of general practice is separating the idiots from the ill.”
“I hope I’ve done so today,” I told him, noticing his eyebrows quivering. “I think I spotted an early tubercule and an early schizophrenia. I packed them off with notes to the appropriate hospitals.”
“You were right, of course. The tuberculous one would sooner or later infect the family, and the mad one would sooner or later smash up the china. Though I try to keep people out of hospitals as long as possible, myself. They’re abnormal institutions. It’s often better for both sides if patients are nursed by their own relatives. A man ought to be given a chance to be born at home, and he certainly ought to have a chance to die there. The family gathers round, you know, and it’s only right he should feel the event is something of an occasion.”
“Sterility…” I murmured.
“Ah, sterility! In the old days there were plenty of prostatic old gentlemen going about with their catheters tucked in their hat-brims. If you’re going to be infected, it might as well be your own bugs. In hospital you’ll get someone else’s, and penicillin-resistant ones they’ll be, too. Still, I’m boring you. Remarkable how senility makes a man ramble, isn’t it?”
I thought practice with Dr Farquarson looked like being stimulating.
My enthusiasm for my new life was dimmed only by crossing the peeling portals of the Crypt Hotel. The hotel stood on the other side of the Abbey, and was a typical English boarding-house of the type I had slept in so many nights since first becoming a medical student. There were yellowing net curtains sagging across the front windows, an austere card askew in the transom announcing VACANCIES, a hall containing chessboard lino worn red down the middle, and a picture of shaggy cattle standing uncomfortably with their feet in a Highland pool. There were notices desiring punctuality over meals and settling accounts, and a landlady whose manner suggested that she was summing up the chances of your murdering the lot of them in their beds. But the place had seemed clean enough and the customary smell of cooking rising up
“Well, I hope I’m not doing down the national Exchequer,” I said anxiously. I knew the penalties for careless certification from a chilly little notice issued by the General Medical Council. Mistakenly entitling an applicant for a bottle of orange juice to a free pair of surgical boots might land me in the local Assizes. “I also seem to be prescribing about twice as many bottles of medicine as are therapeutically necessary.”
“Don’t worry, lad. A citizen’s bodily contentment for half a pint of coloured water is cheap at the price for any Government. Anyway, once the public’s got the idea in their heads that something does them good you’ll never get it out – whether it’s medicine, milk drinks, or meat extracts, which as you know consist of eighty per cent flavouring with no food value whatever and twenty per cent salt to save them from the putrefaction they so richly deserve.”
Dr Farquarson started filling his insanitary-looking pipe.
“The trouble with this generation is that its environment’s outstripping its intelligence. Look at the village idiot – a hundred years ago he sat contentedly on his bench outside the village inn. Someone occasionally gave him a little beer, and someone occasionally gave him a little hoeing. He never got in his own way or anyone else’s. But what happens today? He’s got to cope with pedestrian crossings, income-tax, football pools, national insurance, welfare workers, and God knows what. As he can’t, he either plagues his doctor as a neurotic or they put him inside. Another fifty years and anyone without a working knowledge of nuclear physics will be certified as mentally defective. Oh, it’ll be a happy day when there’s more of us inside than out. But at the moment the job of general practice is separating the idiots from the ill.”
“I hope I’ve done so today,” I told him, noticing his eyebrows quivering. “I think I spotted an early tubercule and an early schizophrenia. I packed them off with notes to the appropriate hospitals.”
“You were right, of course. The tuberculous one would sooner or later infect the family, and the mad one would sooner or later smash up the china. Though I try to keep people out of hospitals as long as possible, myself. They’re abnormal institutions. It’s often better for both sides if patients are nursed by their own relatives. A man ought to be given a chance to be born at home, and he certainly ought to have a chance to die there. The family gathers round, you know, and it’s only right he should feel the event is something of an occasion.”
“Sterility…” I murmured.
“Ah, sterility! In the old days there were plenty of prostatic old gentlemen going about with their catheters tucked in their hat-brims. If you’re going to be infected, it might as well be your own bugs. In hospital you’ll get someone else’s, and penicillin-resistant ones they’ll be, too. Still, I’m boring you. Remarkable how senility makes a man ramble, isn’t it?”
I thought practice with Dr Farquarson looked like being stimulating.
My enthusiasm for my new life was dimmed only by crossing the peeling portals of the Crypt Hotel. The hotel stood on the other side of the Abbey, and was a typical English boarding-house of the type I had slept in so many nights since first becoming a medical student. There were yellowing net curtains sagging across the front windows, an austere card askew in the transom announcing VACANCIES, a hall containing chessboard lino worn red down the middle, and a picture of shaggy cattle standing uncomfortably with their feet in a Highland pool. There were notices desiring punctuality over meals and settling accounts, and a landlady whose manner suggested that she was summing up the chances of your murdering the lot of them in their beds. But the place had seemed clean enough and the customary smell of cooking rising up
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