Doctors And Patience

Medical doctors. Definition: licensed medical practitioners. Nothing more or less. Yet many people view MDs as minor gods. The truth is that doctors are people, and we all know that people are not without their problems. Yes, doctors too, have problems. Do you think that it affects their work? Probably. They are only people after all, some better than others.

Mengele performed abominations upon human subjects in the guise of a researcher. MacDonald, a sociopath, slaughtered out of rage and then necessity. Jeff, the doctor, the Green Beret, the family killer.

"Jeff MacDonald had a fight, killed his wife and kids that night.

Easy evil, calm and suave he sleeps easy, amiable knave:

Easy evil, calm and well, going straight down into hell,

Going straight down into hell".

Somebody wrote that.

Harold Shipman is said to have murdered as many as  a thousand people and was convicted of killing fifteen. John Huntington Story, the infamous "Doc" of the Jack Olsen book of the same title did time for his rapes in Lovell, in the United States. MacDonald, Shipman and others like them are extreme examples, lives out of control, desperate and twisted by circumstances which they have created. Not all doctors are like those fellows.

Human, yet having to appear above the average and often driven by their personalities, MDs become gurus to some. Dr. Kildare charmed us for years with his good looks and his good will. Has any one seen Richard Chamberlain recently? Yet the surgeon shows continue on television and other media. Heroes and villains. Isn't that what it really is all about?

Many MDs today double as businessmen. I used to know a man who waited for an hour every time he visited his optician. Turned out that the specialist he was seeing was running a private practice while on contract to the current administration. He was late from his other job so his patients waited hours upon hours. They had little choice. He was, after all, a specialist. He might as well have told everybody to take a number. Bad bedside manner.

Undoubtedly there are many good doctors, dedicated people, for after all the sworn duty of a doctor is to alleviate suffering and to save lives. A dedicated and morally upright doctor does exactly that, and when he cannot he is compassionate towards his patients and to all their satellites, especially the bereaved.

Yet someone told me that the doctor who diagnosed her mother's eventually fatal condition and who disclosed it to her advised her to "go home and pray" and then charged her the normal fee without batting an eyelid. I wonder what that doctor was going to do for the rest of the day.

Assuming an equal level of competence in the practice of the medical trade, what accounts for the differences between doctors? It seems to me that, just like you and me, they are only people, and so are different from us and from each other. To put them on a pedestal somewhere up above the rest of us is absurd.

Let us rather try to have patience with them.

The Only Living Weakling

Not long ago finished The Only Living Witness, the so-called definitive book on infamous serial sex killer Ted Bundy by Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth

Upon reflection it seems to me that Bundy ranks with Saddam and Hitler. They were three terrible men. All were mass murderers. All raped or facilitated rape, all were extremely cruel, all had a callous disregard for any type of life, particularly of the human variety. Bundy is especially interesting because compared to the others, he was a small man, a nothing man, without vision or a plan for world dominance or his version of mass murder. He was only in it for the sex.

Michaud and Aynesworth attribute the following statement to Bundy: "For some reason it was a necessary way of looking at things. I mean, there are so many people. It shouldn't be a problem. What's one less person on the face of the earth, anyway?"

He was reputed to have repeatedly performed sexual intercourse upon the remains of women that he had killed, and to have in some cases hacked off their heads, carrying them home with him to decorate and to dwell upon, leaving the rest of his victim's remains to be ravaged by animals of all types which were "doing his job" for him.

Good old Ted, the Republican fundraiser, the psych student, the well-mannered charmer. But Bundy was in reality a selfish imitation of a man who cared for nobody but himself. The social science analysts can formulate many terms: psychopath, sociopath, on the wrong path, to fit the man. They can think up all kinds of excuses for why he was the way he was.: it was the way he was treated by his mother, they speculate, and by his father, and all the things that happened to him. Those things and events made him what he was. 

I say that is rubbish. Many men have risen out of the most appalling circumstances without becoming a shallow man who had it easy compared to say, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had it a lot harder. Charles Dickens had it harder too, and  many whose names now escape me and yet  others who came long before and after him. No. "I am not buying it", as the journalists say.

I believe that there is a potential Bundy in all men. We all at some time in our lives have base thoughts about how we would like to behave and act out. Men recognize their potential to be savages, to gratify themselves in a manner which satisfies the crudest desires which arise in their minds and to use their physical superiority to subdue women to their will. 

Should all men behave in this manner then undoubtedly  our society would quickly revert to a much more primitive age, into chaos even. 

Quality men deny the savage side and become breadwinners, husbands, fathers, musicians and writers, engineers and businessmen, farmers and fishermen and many other occupations that contribute to a perceived better society.

Bundy had too much time on his hands and nothing to do with it and he chose to indulge a savage obsession. He was weak and useless. That's all there is to it.

Men of Bundy's ilk exist and they live among us in disguise, not so much in T&T (yet, at least) as in the wider world.

So beware of monsters masquerading as men walking among us.