If symptoms

persist.. .

FOR THEM doctors as speaks proper, understanding what their patients say can be a problem. All British doctors are used to dealing with patients suffering from gastric, of course, and have brought much comfort to those with cardiac hearts; but occasionally patients present with complaints of a wholly unintelligible nature.

A man in his thirties arrived the other day in a state of considerable distress.

`Doctor,' he said. 'I only has to eat fish and eyeclops.'

Who had imposed this strange diet upon him, I wondered, and to what end? Why was he telling me about it? Anyway, what exactly were eyeclops? Eyedrops for Cyclops? Then I had a flash of recog- nition, an aha! experience like the one Archimedes had in his bath.

`You mean you collapse?'

`That's right, doctor. Eyeclops com- pletely.'

One of the great advantages of medi- cal practice is that it extends the practi- tioner's vocabulary and range of locutions. 'Down mine', for example, means at home, in or into my house. I first came across 'down mine' in a letter to a prisoner, who tried to hang himself after receiving it. It was a Dear John let- ter, the kind prisoners receive announc- ing the break-up of their marriage or the defection of their girlfriend.

Dear John, Only don't think I don't love you John I still do but this bloke Bill has moved down mine its only for a short time . . .

Last week I visited a lady who had threatened to dance naked on the traffic island in the middle of her council estate. This was extremely dangerous on account of the broken bottles, squashed beer cans and used condoms lurking in the long grass. She had a lengthy, if in- termittent, history of such activities, and usually they led to hospital admission.

`Don't think I'm half-soaked, doctor,' she said, clapping me on the back as I came through the door. 'But I don't want no more from the social.'

Half-soaked? The social? Had she been to a party and failed to get even tipsy? No: half-soaked meant stupid, and the social was social security. What she said was almost incomprehensible even after I had worked out the meanings of the individual words.

The same week I was called to a youth who was lying in bed sniffing glue and scratching himself all over with a pair of scissors. His parents were worried he might do something stupid.

The cause, or at least occasion, of his behaviour was the desertion of his girl- friend for another. Her previous boyfriend had jumped under a train; she herself was soon to come to court on a charge of grievous bodily harm. Rela- tions between them had always been stormy, but he said he loved her.

`She glassed me once,' he mused nos- talgically.

Glassed him? I asked him to explain. They were in a pub, he said. Then he performed a graphic little mime of breaking a beer glass on the edge of a table and pushing the jagged edge into someone's face.

Involuntarily I murmured, 'How dif- ferent from the home life of our own dear Queen!'

Theodore Dalrymple