musingsonwomenshealth.com

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

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages, princes’ palaces.


The older I get, the more I realize that knowing that is not the same as knowing how. When I attempt to describe knowledge in those terms the deficit is embarrassing. Surely one of the most important components of knowledge is not to be stored like a book on a shelf in another room.

Years ago I recall reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a novel by Mark Twain. Its details are now rather sketchy for me but as I remember it, Twain describes a modern (well 19th century modern anyway) man who, after a blow to his head, thinks he has been transported to an England of the Dark Ages. There, because he was a mechanic in life before his accident, he is able to create things like bicycles, which they didn’t have at the time.

 What really struck me when I read it was recognizing that although I knew what, say, a bicycle was, what it looked like, and what it could be used for, I wouldn’t have ability to construct one on my own. Not just construct one, but know how to make the component parts in a society that had never made, or thought of making them before. In other words how much useful knowledge about bicycles did I really have?

The Ancient Greeks relied on a distinction between ‘knowing-that’ (episteme) and ‘knowing how’ (techne). This was the difference between an abstract body of theoretical knowledge about an area of interest and the practical wisdom necessary to carry out a specific task.[i]

‘In music, for instance, we might call this the difference between knowing what pitch means, what notes are or the other aspects of music theory that help explain how to play — and knowing how to play an instrument like the piano… For American philosopher John Dewey, this amounts to the difference between an education that focuses on information and an education that focuses on habits of thinking and deliberation.’

I suppose some of my early education tried to teach me the basic ‘how’ of things but my family moved a lot, so perhaps each school I attended assumed the previous school had already taught me woodworking, say, or the mysteries of tin shears and making simple things out of metal. Actually, I think I remember being instructed on how to use a lathe once, but alas, I never came close to mastering it before we moved…

My parents were more cerebrally inclined, and the only practical things I remember learning from my father in the golden days of my youth, were that whatever curses were uttered should be task specific. No bathroom stuff, no religious imprecations, and certainly no… you know… stuff about women. Since that omitted most of the words I’d learned at the various schools I attended, the only useful cerebral curse from him that I have retained, but save for special occasions, was ‘jumped-up-mackinaw’. I have no idea what that means, but the act of uttering it with a loud hiss, even in my twilight years, tends to reliably dampen whatever hostilities I was harbouring. It does little to foster my critical thinking skills, however.

At any rate, my father was a railway accountant, so I think it would be unfair to judge him on his pedagogic prowess. My mother was the teacher in the family but, alas, of a different era and geographic location, so because we moved very frequently, her once enlightened scholastic ideas sometimes lagged behind us.

I mention these family peccadillos softly and largely exoneratively. My only regret is that now that my way of life is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf, and that which must accompany old houses, as honor, love, and troops of plumbers I must look to have; I must also stop reading so much Shakespeare…

I remain a dedicated episteme – the techne part continues to elude me; I know about taps -even dripping taps- but if they’re not fixable by turning the faucet handle more aggressively they are likely to require a phone call to my son. He learned a little about the intricacies of washers, or under-sink maneuvers from his mother I guess, but he would caution me that force did not fix leaks; plumbers did…

The plumber, once he arrived, usually had the plumber’s grin on his face and the standard eye-twinks they must still teach at plumbing school; it acknowledges the problem but does little to absolve me for worsening it: standard old-school plumbing stuff, I guess.

You would think that online plumbing instructions with their detailed but (for me) unfathomable diagrams would consign plumbers to history; only called upon for major pipe bursts, or to unplug stuff that somehow lodged itself in the nether parts of the toilet lines; traffic jams which happen when you have little kids visiting; or jams that just ‘happen’ when the kids acquire raging hormones, and bring their girlfriends along for the unsupervised late night visits their mothers have nightmares about.

At first I convinced myself that the signs I put on toilet tank covers would at least alert the older ones, but I suppose urgency sometimes precludes perusal, even with the large purple, troubled, yet compassionate faces I drew for them to see. Fortunately, Time heals; unfortunately it also means the kids seldom visit anymore.

Anyway, nowadays the most embarrassing things that happen because I alone cohabit with my aging plumbing, relate to the little screen-things which live inside the business ends of taps. They clog up if you get your water from a shallow well for some reason; I keep forgetting that unfortunate detail for a different reason than hormones (which, now being absent anyway, I can no longer use as an excuse). No, I am now old, and have probably outlived any well-trained neurons. My plumber is also aging I suppose, but with his Age came Wisdom; mine came alone -if you don’t count knobbly fingers. But, I console myself, that it is why we have plumbers; and mine hath borne himself beyond the promise of his age, doing, in the figure of a lamb, the feats of a lion… Damn Shakespeare -there I go again…!

[i] https://theconversation.com/the-problem-with-online-learning-it-doesnt-teach-people-to-think-161795

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