Second opinion

ON my way to the ward last week I reflected — as I often do — on the fallen state of man. Given the nature of my contact with the human race, this is scarcely surprising. Is man, asked the Victorians anxiously in response to Dar- win's Origin of Species, a risen ape or a fallen angel? I should be inclined to reply, by way of compromise, that he is a fallen ape.

The patient in the first bed had two fading black eyes and was bruised all over. I asked her who had beaten her up.

'It doesn't matter any more,' she said. 'It was a long time ago.'

'How long?'

'Two weeks.'

I was just turning to leave her bed when she said, 'Doctor, I've got a sore throat.'

I took out my torch and asked her to open wide, just as Dr S. did when I was a child, though I haven't yet graduated to his intimidating, gold-rimmed, half-moon spectacles.

She opened her mouth, but only until it was a narrow black slit in her face. 'Can't you do better than that?' I asked. `Not since they had to wire my jaw,' she replied. Just then the cause of her bro- ken jaw walked in. He was stripped to the waist and had two large, gold ear- rings. I couldn't help but recall what a taxi-driver had said he would like to do to football hooligans: 'I'd hang 'em up by their ear-rings.' 'How is she, doctor?' asked her solici- tous jaw-breaker.

I muttered something and crossed the ward to another bed, in which there was a man with what is sometimes known as a lived-in face, that is to say it was heavi- ly scarred, with a nose which had been broken many times. He looked like one of those carved figures on a Gothic cathedral after a Protestant iconoclast had been at it. It required comparatively weak powers of observation to deduce that he was an alcoholic.

'I see you've been attacked a few times,' I said.

'Yes,' he replied. 'My best friend attacked me with a machete. I needed 19 stitches and a steel plate in my skull.'

'If that's a friend, what are your ene- mies like?' I asked. 'I forgave him, he'd been on the weed all day so he didn't know what he was doing.'

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the subject of prison came up.

'I done a lot of prison, 40 years to be exact.'

'But you're only 50,' I said.

'Yes, well of them 40 I only served 15.' 'A waste of life.'

'Prison's nothing to me, doctor, I'm not afraid of prison. It's not prison any more — it's a holiday camp.'

'The one in which I work isn't a holi- day camp.'

'No, not that one, I'm talking about the open prisons. I was in L— open prison, it was a doddle. My brother used to take my place for me at weekends. And he brought a double bed in for me and my girlfriend.'

'Why were you in prison last time?'

'I had this girlfriend, she had 70 grand in the bank. She bought me a van. Cost me six months of my life, that van did.'

'How, drunken driving?'

'Yes, that engine should never of start- ed, the state I was in.'

Theodore Dalrymple