ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a series of pithy observations (and some regret) on clinical practice and medical matters that should stimulate concern as well as wonder and amusement as well as plain irritation. Irritation largely at human failings where potential beckons: ‘Rhinoceritis is the condition that descends on the characters in Ionescu’s play Rhinoceros who lose their ability to think critically and start mouthing platitudes. They become infected with the need to be a herd’. From the aphoristic ‘The failing’ (‘If there isn’t something wrong with you there’s something wrong with you. So runs the contemporary mantra that proves our modernity’) to canny insights, for example on Oliver Sacks’s early drug habits, to plain wit: ‘He passed away peacefully, after a long battle against the successive encroachments of military-medical metaphors’, this chapter roams across medical territory rarely visited or grazed. As for poetry, there’s some Pessoa, but the entire chapter advertises a poetic voice in citrous register.
