a plea in mitigation


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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