Subject: a plea in mitigation
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Tue Nov 13 2001 - 04:53:21 GMT
I certainly wish to see no trade exempted from exposure
& parody – least of all my own. No one finds shrinks
a more pitiable, laughable bunch of practitioners than I do.
And of course it’s a hoary old truism that the specialty
attracts an especially high proportion of misfits, inadequates
& nuts, all of us seeking a cure for our own neuroses.
Yet the sadistic nurse or the barmy analyst are such easy
targets that I become exasperated when they’re trundled
out yet again for the enlightened to smirk or tut-tut over;
& are left naked to the general censure as if that were all
there was to say about them.
I’ve seen too many people in the depths of their distress
derive their only hope & strength from those same unlikely
figures.
(They must sometimes feel like Kipling’s Tommy:
It’s Tommy this & Tommy that,
And Tommy save your soul.
But it’s 'this way, Mr Atkins,'
When the drums begin to roll.)
I think, actually, my real exasperation is with the commonality
who by keeping abreast of the Health pages of the NY Times
feel themselves on the cutting edge – having forgotten what
Proust pointed out long ago: that the history of medicine is
simply the sequential replacement of one fashionable view by its
contradiction. Wonder drugs & CAT scans & stereotactic surgery
still play only limited & rather doubtful roles in psychiatry.
Humanity & imaginative understanding remain irreplaceable.
You can still come across them under the starchiest of uniforms
& the wildest of hairdos.
Scottie B.
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