diary

theodore dalrymple

Is it my imagination, or have they turned down the volume of the pre-recorded muezzin calls in Turkey this year? Perhaps it is only that my hearing has grown less acute with age. After all, I learned that I was short-sighted many years ago by complaining at a clinical pathology conference that the pathology slides shown were nothing but a pink and blue blur, having assumed that the problem was with the slides rather than with my eyes. The subject of my talk in Turkey was the social changes in Britain discernible from a comparison of the crime novels of Agatha Christie and Ian Rankin. I accept that there was nothing scientific about my method – it was like trying to examine the effects of the French Revolution by comparing Molière with Céline – but all the same I couldn’t help feeling that there was something to my approach. For example, one couldn’t imagine either Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple chewing gum, as Rebus does, or taking gum out of their mouths and dropping it on the pavement, as Rebus also does. Neither could I imagine either of Agatha Christie’s sleuths listening, like Rebus, to the music of a band called Spooky Tooth.

It Could Be Verse

medical history, after all; most people have experienced illness of some severity and all know that death awaits. Roy Fuller wrote of the thyrotoxicosis that he inherited from his mother, while Alexander Pope penned

one of the most piercing lines ever written about illness: ‘This long disease, my life’. These words were not hyperbole or mere self-pity: Pope suffered terribly all his life from Pott’s disease (tuberculosis of the spine) and by the end was unable to sit up in bed unaided by contraptions. W E Henley’s hospital poems offer a moving (and early modernist) account of the eighteen months he spent in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh under the care of Joseph Lister, who through constant attention saved his second leg from having to be amputated due to tuberculosis of the bone, his first having already been amputated. It is difficult to write a hero-worshipping poem that is not sickly, but Henley managed it (justifiably) with regard to Lister.

While both writers are witty, Christie is cosily comforting and Rankin is anxiety-provoking. In preparing my talk, however, my main pleasure was in rereading Francis Iles’s novel Malice Aforethought, a wonderful comedy of manners, in which the hero, Dr Bickleigh, is acquitted of a murder that he did commit and hanged for one that he did not. It is my favourite crime novel. Of course, crime writers of the so-called Golden Age are often accused of a lack of social realism, of writing fairy stories in which both the murdered and murderers are upper-middle class and use refined methods, when in fact most murders are purely sordid and brutal. But Iles had been badly wounded in the First World War and was familiar with horror. Strangely enough, life imitated art, at least to an extent, for Dr Bickleigh used a method of killing his wife, getting her fatally addicted to opiates, that was similar to that alleged twenty-six years later against Dr John Bodkin Adams, the general practitioner in Eastbourne who in 1957 was acquitted (as was Dr Bickleigh) of killing a patient by the same means, and who was widely suspected of having murdered many other widows in Eastbourne for their legacies.

Dr Bodkin Adams (what a perfect name for a murderer!) was the subject of a great comic poem. It circulated a little while before his trial, to the great annoyance of the police, and to this day no one knows who wrote it. I have included it in my little book about medicine and poetry, Illness as Inspiration. The poem begins: ‘In Eastbourne, it is healthy/And the residents are wealthy,/It’s a miracle that anybody dies.’ As for the rich old widows:

If they’re lucky in addition In their choice of a physician And remember him when making out their wills, And bequeath their Rolls-Royces Then they soon hear angel voices And are quickly freed from all their earthly ills.

The connections between medicine and poetry are rich and varied, of course, and not confined to murderous doctors. Everyone has a

There have been doctor-poets, too, though perhaps not of the first rank, among them Oliver Goldsmith, Robert Bridges, William Carlos Williams and Dannie Abse. Bridges, the only medical poet laureate, is largely forgotten: few second-hand bookshops are without at least one copy of his The Testament to Beauty, now unread though it went through many reprints. He was a physician at the Hospital for Sick Children, and his poem about a small child whose death he was powerless to prevent is instinct with pain and lack of consolation.

The strange thing is that even non-consolatory, or even anticonsolatory, poems do not depress us, but rather console us. In ‘Aubade’, Larkin’s fear of death could hardly seem more desolate (he wrote it at what seems to me now the young age of fifty-five), but it consoles, just as pressing on a sore point sometimes relieves pain while also exacerbating it:

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain edges will grow light. Till then I see what’s always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die.

As soon as I arrived back in Paris from Turkey, I went to a bookshop. My obsession with books, from which I have suffered, or which I have enjoyed, most of my life, makes me feel increasingly like a dinosaur, or a person who writes with a goose quill. Surely it is time to abandon the printed page for the screen? I was therefore delighted to buy a book by a French neuroscientist, Michel Desmurget, titled La fabrique du crétin digital (‘The Making of the Digital Cretin’). The author denies completely – and with much evidence to back him up – the optimistic supposition that somehow or other playing endless video games and multitasking on various screens increases children’s powers of concentration, logic, memory and sociability. On the contrary, he argues, it is inimical to their intellectual, social and emotional development: precisely the conclusion that I wanted the author to reach, because it helps to persuade me that my obsession with books has not been entirely an expense of spirit in a waste of shame. r

october 2019 | Literary Review 1