As you ‘may not’ like it: The Great Medical Tragedy

 

 

An injection of Paracetamol could have brought down my fever pretty fast and I would have been back to work the next day. Instead, I preferred to take the longer route – the tablets – self-monitoring of body temperature and pulse rate – and again some tablets – over five days. It wasn’t the fear of injection. It was the tepid taste of medical textbooks. A carefully crafted escape route – “Stay bedridden”.

As the seconds ticked away in bed, my brain was becoming far more comfortable in analysing how things could have been different in Jamaica had it not been for the rain and those 100 precious overs that went down the drain…  Had there been a live Fourth Umpire, I’d have chosen to stay on meds for longer…

Some years ago, I had read a book ‘The Medici effect’. The intersection. It had sounded powerful. The intermingling of ideas… courses… polar opposites. Now I encounter it every day. The agony? It turns out to be a total mess! The soul of science dwells in simplifying concepts… breaking huge chunks into tangible pieces. Unfortunately, medical texts superimposed with esoteric literature do little justice to the demands of science. Moreover, I’d go to the extent of saying that it is a waste of good faultless literature. If you can pen down in the fashion of William Somerset Maughan, then why indulge in writing a meta-analysis of a drug-trial? There’s something called ‘magic of words’. And the job of an artist is to offer a sanctuary of beauty to the ugly world. What is the point of making something look beautiful when it is not? Why waste our repertoire of exotic words for something as grim as a ‘tumour’? Literature has got a purpose to serve. I don’t think this is one of them. Or else, let’s not call this medical science. There’s so much of subjective variation – it wouldn’t be a mistake to call this ‘medical poetry’. Some appreciate, some don’t. Flame-shaped haemorrhages do not always look like flames. Bright-red coloured urine. How bright? Why don’t we get a spectrophotometry done before concluding? And yes, a ‘boot-shaped heart’ on an X-Ray. I wish I could ask – which style of boot? The ’60s? or the ’70s? Italy also appears as a boot-shaped country on the world map. And it is of a completely different design! I’m relieved Geography is still a subject of the ‘Humanities’.

Medical textbooks give me a feel of ‘something gone seriously wrong’. Those aspiring writers who probably had enough scientific temperament and got carried away with no one to stop them. They didn’t listen to their literary counterparts because well, studying science virtually equals the intelligence quotient. How tragic! Only if medical textbook writers could go back in time and realise one thing. It wasn’t the design of the atom bomb that took the world by storm. It was the beautifully lucid e = mc² that got etched in our minds. Forever.