GIST Support WikiQUOTEs from Anatole Broyard’s “The Patient Examines the Doctor” (part 1)
“CHOOSING A DOCTOR is difficult because it is our first explicit confrontation of our illness. “How good is this man?” is to imply the reverse of “How bad am I?” To be sick brings out all our prejudices and primitive feelings. Like fear or love, it makes us a little crazy. Yet the craziness of the patient is part of his condition.”
“You don’t really know that you’re ill until the doctor tells you so. When he tells you you’re ill, this is not the same as giving you permission to be ill.”
“You eke out your illness. You’ll always be an amateur in your illness. Only you will love it.”
“The knowledge that you’re ill is one of the momentous experiences in life. You expect that you’re going to go on forever, that you’re immortal. Freud said that every man is convinced of his own immortality…When the doctor told me I was ill it was like an immense electric shock. I felt galvanized…All of my old trivial selves fell away, and I was reduced to essence. I began to look around me with new eyes, and the first thing I looked at was my doctor.”
"I had no reason to believe that he was not good. He was in a good hospital...yet I continued to observe him with something like displeasure. During surgical procedures, doctors wear a tight fitting white cap, a sort of skullcap like the one Alan Alada wears on M*A*S*H. To this my doctor had added what looked like a clear plastic shower cap, and the moment I saw him in these two caps, I turned irrevocably against him.
He wore them absolutely without inflection or style, with none of the jauntiness that usually comes with long practice. Now, I think a doctor who has been around, he knows how to do these things. There was no attempt to mitigate the two caps. The first was like a condom stuck on his head. He didn't look good in it. He had a round face, and in the cap he looked confused and uncertain. He wore it like an American in France who affects a beret without understanding how to shape or cock it. To my eyes this doctor simply didn't have the charisma to overcome or assimilate those caps, and this completed my disaffection.
Certainly I'm no judge of his medical competence, nor do I mean to criticize it. What turned me against him was what I saw as a lack of style or magic. I realized that I wanted my doctor to have magic as well as medical ability. It was like having a 'lucky' doctor."
“To be sick is already to be disordered in your mind…I wanted a doctor who would answer to my absurdity and triumph over it. I think that if man should ever give in to his prejudices, it’s when he’s ill. ‘For God’s sake,’ cling to your prejudices. They’re the only tastes you’ve got. I don’t mean racial prejudices. I mean all prejudices, instinctive likes and dislikes. I’m convinced that my prejudice in the matter of medicine reflects the intelligence of my unconscious, and so I go with it. I need my prejudices. They’re going to save me.”