musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

What, can the devil speak true?


Do you ever have the feeling that you know something so well, understand it so completely, that further discussion is unnecessary? That differing opinions about it are shallow, and not worth considering because they may be misleading or false? Although knowledge is always tentative, and should be open to amendments if new facts come to light, it is often more comfortable to remain the expert basking in whatever glory still adheres to the role.

As Banquo asks the witches at the beginning of the Shakespeare’s Macbeth, ‘If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me’. Knowing can be a role, which is addictive -a role that was referred to as knowingness by the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear as a position of always ‘already knowing’, of purporting to know the answers even before the question arises; of not being shocked by new revelations because you were already aware of them.

I like the neologism knowingness -I had not heard it before, so I suppose that currently disqualifies me for that particular role- but we all audition for it from time to time. And whether we are hired or not, we insist on practicing the part whenever the opportunity arises, trying it out to see if we can get away with it.

My older brother was like that for a while when I was young; of course in those days, he really did know more than me about a world I’d never encountered. But under circumstances like that, except through his words, how could I check whether his braggadocio was justified? There was no internet in those days -no search engines, and no way of knowing the correct spelling of something he had mentioned so I could look it up in the library. In the Winnipeg of those early years, he was my arbiter of truth, my Alpha and Omega; he was the teacher whose opinion I could never competently challenge, let alone confute. He was ten years older than me, for goodness sakes.

But in those days, he was still a teenager, drunk on hormones, and flaunting his developing credentials for his admiring acolyte. And it was not in vain: for a while, I subsequently wore his mantle I fear. When he moved on to respected positions where he could advise instead of dictate on matters in which he had achieved his expertise, I had yet to journey through my omniscient teenage years. I had yet to admit that, far from omniscience, I was merely gathering the seeds of knowledge, not harvesting a ripened crop.

Perhaps I had already learned too much from my brother though; my knowingness, followed me to university. I had enrolled in a BSc course in Biology at my mother’s insistence; she was grooming me for a career in Medicine  even though my goal had always been either Philosophy, or more likely, Journalism. My brother, in one of his iterations, had been a journalist for one of the big city newspapers, but my mother always complained that he hadn’t used the potential he so obviously possessed. At any rate, she made sure to fill me full of myself (or, more likely, herself) and redirect my own slowly unfolding writing skills into stories of how I could use them to help my patients.

Under her tutelage, it became difficult for me to be anything other than overconfident -and it showed. One of the women I dated in my first year at university was a well-read and a talented artist, but she was terrified of essay assignments; she knew perfectly well what she wanted to say, but couldn’t seem to put her thoughts into a coherent pattern. I loved writing essays, of course, and so she asked me if I could give her a few instructions. I tried, but despite my coaxing, she stalled after the first paragraph or two, so I ended up writing the whole essay for her. She got such good marks, she asked me to write the rest of her essays in the course for the full year. I had to be careful, of course; I had to create a style for her that was different from my own and stick to it.

She switched to a Fine Arts course after the first year and I lost touch with her. But I was once again hooked on the joy of writing, and began to wonder if I could actually use it for a career in Biology -writing essays for the general public to explain things in, say, Botany for example. I got my first chance at that with an assignment in a second year Biology class when we had to pick a topic for our mid-term grade. Unfortunately that was around the Christmas holidays and I completely forgot about it until I returned from a rather lazy visit with my parents.

The only topic not taken, by that time, was about why leaves changed colour in the fall. In those days, I don’t think anybody really knew how the process worked (or more probably, I didn’t actually look in any modern textbooks or scientific articles to find out). At any rate, I cobbled together a fantastic yarn about how the fall of the coloured leaves would be seen by a very young child, and the magic he would be sure had caused that to happen.

Looking back now on what I’d written those many decades ago, I have to blush. I meant the essay to be tongue-in-cheek, but the professor loved it and commended me on my unusual approach to a topic no one else had chosen. In fact, she read it to the class.

You can imagine what that did to my ego -and my mother’s. “I told you so, G,” she kept saying whenever I phoned home. “Now you can explain complicated scientific things so the rest of us can understand them… You’ll make a wonderful doctor, dear.” She wouldn’t rest until I chose medicine as a career…

My brother had a different take on it, though. I went to visit him in Alberta the summer after my mother finally cajoled me into applying for medical school. He was less than convinced about my suitability for medicine after hearing about that essay on coloured leaves, however.

I was a little too arrogant about it, I’m afraid. “I just made it up the night before, Ron,” I said, beaming with pride. “I pretended I had a son who had asked me to tell him why the leaves changed colour in the fall; so I made it into a bedtime story for him.”

“I thought it was a formal essay to determine your course marks, G…” He didn’t sound at all pleased. But he was an assistant professor by that stage, and took a dim view of gaming the system. “Wasn’t it actually an exercise in writing a Scientific paper -something you’d need to perfect before you actually reported on any investigations you might undertake as a scientist?”

“Oh, come on, eh? It was just an assignment.”
“Nevertheless, you were pretending knowledge that you didn’t possess.”
“It was just an assignment on a topic…”
“And you were supposed to have researched it, not made it up, G!” He rolled his eyes and shook his head slowly. “Is that the kind of scientific writing you’d want the public to believe about why the leaves changed colours in autumn? It wasn’t intended as a fictional essay; it was a practice run to teach you how to research and explain a topic!”

He took a deep breath and then sighed noisily, as he used to do at home when my mother met him at the door after he got home late. “Look, I know you had to come up with something for the essay, but I want you to think about your attitude, G. We look up to scientists -and especially doctors- for their wisdom. I don’t think you should fool with that. A window can shatter after the smallest crack…” he added, in a vain attempt at an aphorism.

Then he looked at me for a moment before his face softened, and the older brother I’d always known gradually reappeared. “Any chance I could read a copy of that essay, by the way?” A smile slowly wedged its way through his lips. “Mom always said you were almost as good a writer as me,” he added, his eyes twinkling the way they always did when he looked at me after pulling something over on her. “I never believed her, though…”

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gozzter

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