Fool or Physician: The Memoirs of a Sceptical Doctor by Anthony Daniels

Author:Anthony Daniels [Daniels, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographies & Memoirs, Professionals & Academics, Medical, Travelers & Explorers, Travel
Amazon: B004UOH7NU
Publisher: Monday Books
Published: 2011-03-29T22:00:00+00:00

Every night and every morn

Some to misery are born.

Every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.

The circumstances and characters of our patients seemed to weigh so heavily against the chance of improvement that fatalism (always so easy to adopt in respect of other people) was almost the only defence against despair.

For more than two years our ward was home to a woman of fifty who had spent much of the previous twenty years in and out of mental hospitals. She had contracted syphilis first at the age of seventeen, and had been subjected to a prefrontal leucotomy in the hope it would improve her morals, at a time when enthusiastic surgeons were performing the procedure on out-patients. (The first grateful patient ever to receive the operation later shot the surgeon, the only Portuguese ever to win the Nobel Prize for medicine, in the back.) Her husband infected her again when he returned from the army. He was a waster, seldom keeping a job for long, acting as pimp to his wife when he ran short of money for the betting shop. When the money was spent he would turn on his wife, accuse her of being a prostitute, and send her out again. Not surprisingly, his wife began to develop signs of the emotional instability which eventually confined her more or less permanently to mental hospital. When I knew her she was slightly shrivelled: her teeth were not her own, and without them her face was that of a wizened old lady. With them her skin was stretched unnaturally taut like parchment over her skull. She painted her lips (inaccurately) a vivid red, caked her cheeks with white and pink powder, and used heavy eye make-up – black, blue and sometimes green. Her mood was so volatile that it would change from profound depression to hilarity and back again in the space of a single sentence, though her hilarity was never free of desperation. Her husband’s visits grew less and less frequent, until he would just leave a packet of cigarettes at the porter’s gate once a month and flee. When his wife was short of cigarettes – the currency, no, the lifeblood, of the mental hospital – she would evade the nurses’ less than watchful eye and make her way to the rubbish tip behind the nearby market, where she offered herself to vagrants, by then the only takers, first for the price of a packet, but towards the end for a single cigarette and even a few drags. Her laugh was like that of a hyena, punctuated by sudden screams of ‘Joe!’ (her husband’s name). Shrieks of ‘Joe! Joe!’ pierced the air, fracturing the silence of the night, so penetratingly that neighbours of the hospital complained. Then suddenly, when all seemed hopeless, there was a ray of hope. Joe had been injured at work and awarded several thousand pounds in compensation. It seemed briefly that the money might liberate her, at least for a time, from the utter sordidness of her life.

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