Some thespians in long-running medical dramas probably end up knowing as much about medicine as many junior doctors. If a customer collapsed in a restaurant these days and you were to ask, “Does anyone have medical training?” three members of the actors’ union Equity might rush to jostle each other for centre stage.
As the artist Paul Gauguin once said to Vincent van Gogh, “Besides the poison, there is the antidote.” He was talking about mixing 100 proof absinthe and 100% art, voicing his belief that absinthe makes the art grow stronger. I would adopt that as a maxim for life, but I can’t paint, not even if you offered me toffee.
How would some of the better-known doctors have reacted to a pandemic? Dr Kildare would have posed dramatically; Ben Casey might have growled and stared the virus down; Dr Jekyll would have been in two minds about how to behave; and Dr Who would have simply transmogrified into another person, possibly a covid-resistant child, one that not even Daleks could exterminate.
It is comforting to think that the road to our present infernal plague is paved with good inventions — and even better scientists and doctors. Where would we be without Marie Curie, winner of 2 Nobel Prizes, Physics and Chemistry, two subjects as difficult as making Mr. Mxyzptlk say his own name backwards, the only way to stop him tormenting Superman. (It’s “kel-tip-zix-um”, don’t say this isn’t educational.)
And talking of difficult names, how would we fight pandemics without Dr Röntgen’s X-rays? Where would hospital patients be without the oxygen cylinders of a Scottish doctor called John Haldane? Or the many scientists over the centuries who refined and developed microscopes? Our debt to them cannot be magnified enough, ha ha.
I’ve saved the best until last, of course, and if we were choosing our First XI team to challenge the coronavirus, our captain would have to be Edward Jenner, inventor of the smallpox vaccine. A leading goalscorer would be Louis Pasteur, who helped develop vaccines for rabies and anthrax. People like them won the match for us a long time ago.
A long time ago, too, Gauguin talked about poison being an antidote, almost as if he knew how vaccines worked. Van Gogh himself was equally insightful: “To the ego, love is poison,” he said. “And the poison is the cure.” Zowee. And he could paint as well.
