Low life
Doctor Death
Jeffrey Bernard
The medical profession is a constant source of irritation to me and, seeing as much of it as I do, I can't say that either it or I improve with age. Their latest dose of nonsense is their recently published study revealing that no fewer than 98 out of 250 patients contributed to their own deaths through overeating, drinking, smoking or not complying with treatment. They don't actually tell you just how many people contributed to their own deaths by seeking medical advice, but what the study has done for me is to remind me of the one and only time lever managed to kill a man.
It must have been about fourteen years ago. I was working for Queen magazine at the time and the then editor, Dennis Hackett, sent for me one day and told me he'd read a bit in the paper about how Ras Prince Monolulu was seriously ill in the Middlesex Hospital and why didn't I go along and see him and interview him at the same time. Why not indeed, Well, I turned up at the hospital and thought I'd get him something from the shop downstairs — fags, soap or a couple of magazines or something — but I ended up buying him a box of Black Magic chocolates. Oddly enough, I didn't intend it as a joke at the time, but it was horribly appropriate as it turned out.
I found him upstairs in a ward in his bed lying as flat as a plate and looking pretty awful. You could see he hadn't got a hope never mind a horse and he wasn't ever going to go to Epsom again. I told him about how Santa Claus had just won the Derby and he perked up a bit so I opened the box of Black Magic. I didn't think he'd be able to manage the nougat so I popped the strawberry cream in his mouth. He bit into it, swallowed and started coughing. A nurse came over to us, told me to wait outside the ward and then she drew the screens around his bed. He was dead in no time.
Now, if there's one thing that will send the Royal College of Physicians scurrying off to make a study, and one thing the medical profession as a whole can't stomach, it's any of us dying without their assistance. You are simply not allowed to die of lung cancer, bread and too much butter or alcoholic cirrhosis and, I suspect, there'll come a day when nobody will be allowed to die at all. There should, of course, be Government Health Warnings on boxes of chocolates and signs by every gutter telling you that crossing the road may damage your health but there aren't and presumably there aren't since doctors themselves sometimes have to cross roads and eat chocolates.
It's been a mystery to me, ever since these warning signs were initiated, that there aren't any on bottles of booze. I suppose that the Royal College of Physicians have already made an expensive study of derelict meths drinkers who snuff it on bombed sites but if that wasn't all right then I suppose they would have been warned or at least have had their wrists slapped. What they do object to is made quite clear in the study. They say a man aged twenty-four who suf fered cardiac arrest and irretrievable brain damage during acute alcoholic intoxication occupied a bed in a teaching hospital for four months before he died, although it was clear from the outset that no recovery was possible. (My italics). It's all right to occupY a bed for four months with jaundice cool" plicated by piles, cystitis, tennis elbow and too much wax in the ears, but you musn't be in bed with something they can't under stand because that's a nuisance and not quite nice. Mind you, how anyone who has to spend seven formative years studying in 3 teaching hospital can understand anything whatsoever of life beyond a game of rugger and a fumbled pass at a nurse is quite beyond me. It's over the entrance of every hospital in the country that they should have signs saying, 'Warning. Entering hospital mg damage your health. Talking to doctors irlaY damage your brain.' Yes, it's no wonder the study group found that doctors' Pronouncements 'tended not to be poPola?' What they could do to empty some of those wasted beds is to go round the wards and hand out the chocolates.
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