The Arts, Sciences and Medicine: SHAKESPEARE AND THE DOCTOR

A SICKNESS IN THE WITLESS KINGDOM

“In my heart there was a fighting that would not let me sleep…Our indiscretion sometime serves us well, when our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us there’s divinity that shapes our ends…”

Such are the pains that grow and grow and keep us from living a comforting life. The tumult that shudders and causes pain relives in our dreams. We march to the cry of the pained and the harmed to sooth and comfort as our comfort is discomforted, yet we march on in search of love for humanity. The wakeful moments when sleep surrounds and the flesh is laid bare, the white sinews glisten as the red blood congeals under the surgeon’s scalpel. Time is spent to heal.

“Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes between the pass and fell incensed points of mighty opposites.”

The argument ensues between the physician adamant and rigid in his demand to serve his fellowman comes face to face with the mandates of the powerful and finds himself at odds to do right or acquiesce to the tyranny. And yet when all the power is drained from the powerful the end is the same between the two: “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.” What lies at the end is the monument, a testament to the grave-maker; “the houses he makes last till doomsday.” The power like time is fleeting. The madness is also passing. The arrow of time flies and having flown it brings a strange opacity to the past and color to the future. Some are bewildered by the strangeness of that hue, easily moved and rendered unmoving to all other voices save their own. Reason is imprisoned by their desires. All is material. All is passion.

“Give me that man that is not passion’s slave and I will wear him in my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart…”

Through reason and deductive efforts the doctor must understand the nuance of a wince, a groan, a loss of desire, of melting flesh, of fragile bones and via that knowledge plead with the consolation of his virtuous thoughts to end what nature or nurture has begun. In doing so, end the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to…” and render health or find the blanket of comfort and soothe to console the imperiled life. A doctor is indeed the very firmament of reason. His virtue is in to mend, to heal, to seek and to reason.

“The spirit that I have seen, may be a devil and the devil hath power t’assume a pleasing shape…”

When with suddenness and without warning there follow uncalled for unexpected riches in the name of ‘good for the many,’ the spark of question must also follow. Is the individual not the portion of the whole community or society and does not making him or her, the sole purpose of all endeavors? Healing him may yet heal the whole! Yet in these heady times the good of the many betrays the good of the one. He or she is lead to the gallows forsaken under the premise of ex-multis. The powerful then “abuses me to damn me.” Ruthless desires overtake to circumvent the need of the one under the egalitarian umbrella. After all such actions are the consequence of thought that churns and bleeds the fiscal brain with the comfort of; “What is a man if his chief good and market of this time be but to feed and sleep.” And think, “That capability and godlike reason to fust in us unus’d,” is but bestial oblivion.

“What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

The physician devotes his life in the learning, finding new ways to limit agony, new methods to purge disquiet and new techniques to ward off discomfort. He marches to the beat of the infirmed and the vulnerable. Power and riches do not entice him or her; the need drives him. To quell, to soothe and “to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them,” is the quintessence of his being. The wretchedness of the body’s decay, do not fend him or her off. She whispers softly and labors with, “grunts and sweats under the weary life” each day and night to bring solace to her fellow being. The doctor in her cries as she looks upon her patient, “What is he whose grief bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow conjures the wand’ring stars and make them stand like wonder-wounded hearers?” This then is also her salvation. The quiet and hum of life, healed! For most physicians feel as Hamlet feels; "O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." And those dreams are the voices of sorrow, of pain, of anguish and anxiety.

“We defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all. ”

We act as if our actions have little or no negative consequences. The unintended ones lurk underneath and yet we defy the omens, the dull grey beads of disaster that come in slow but hypnotizing fashion clouding the brain. “I shall win at the odds,” is the only thought and doggedly marches to that drumbeat. Neitzsche observed, “ Not reflection, no – true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action…” We do arrive at incremental truths about the state of the state in medicine and yet with a flourish of this and that we do away with the warning signs and blink them into obscurity. Their minds are made up. It is what they must do and there the illogic fails for the powerful. For in the end, “And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.”

Polonius advice to his son, Laertes: “This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man,” is remarkable in its hypocrisy. Whereas he is the meddling intellectual that proffers from the inferences he draws to influence the mighty king, he simultaneously offers that Hamlet, without proper reasoning, is mad, “Though this be madness, there is method in’t.”

There are many who embody the flesh of Polonius. They contrive and conjure to manipulate circumstance. These clever and studied orphans of untruth live in the dichotomy of their stardom and villainy; one desired the other earned! They spin from the wombs of their mentality a web so intricate that it confounds the minds of many. The complexity so intricately weaved that only simplicity alone can undo. Yet the wandering, believing minds that cannot chart the course to reason find ways and means to consolidate their thinking and in so doing any words to the contrary that attempt to alienate such unholy wisdom are demonized. The vile mechanism meanwhile feeds the; “Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight, ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all…” There are also many a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in society willing to take on the task of distraction, of execution of opinions and reviling sense with nonsense to gain favor and trust of the kings. These are fools that “cleave the general ear with horrid speech, make mad the guilty and appal the free, confound the ignorant and amaze indeed the very faculties of eyes and ears.” These are charlatans, whose folly is only known to those that reason and think and who understand and wait with patience and true knowledge. For villainy “though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ.” Eventually!