Our inheritance is so much richer, whatever the flaws. Pic: LuckyBusiness/Getty Images
Dr Garrett FitzGerald examines the recent Enlightenment in medicine, religion and society as a whole, which has produced a country no longer indoctrinated from cradle to grave, but questioning the values coming from on high.
In the more formal days of medical school and hospital, I signed to the effect that I had “honour, sir to be your obedient servant”. This extract, from the last line of the application form to become an intern at my teaching hospital, went the way of all such nonsense a decade or two later. Perhaps the world was changing?
In my previous incarnation as defiant iconoclast, I signed — but I didn’t mean a word of it. This reflected failure on my part, having been exposed to 35 weeks per annum of intense residential character-moulding therapy by an all-male religious sect on whose vow of unquestioning obedience to the supreme pontiff Heinrich Himmler modelled the SS.
In those heady days in Ireland, the man (always a man, except when it was the reverend mother) with the highest position was always ‘right’.
His opinion was final and was best regarded as dogma.
During a teaching session for my year, a teacher-man who was about halfway up the medical hierarchy ladder explained in the presence of Herr professor the reality of medical life to us. ”I believe,” dixit, “that each of you students will make about 12 mistakes every day.
“The intern here will make six (Intern here humbly bows), I myself will make three mistakes, however trivial (reverential sniggering by a few wrong-vocation lads), and even the professor himself will make one mistake every day!”
The professor immediately responded: “Speak for yourself, Doctor!”
Loose notions
Expressing such loose notions could lead to uninformed persons actually questioning a professor’s edicts — or those of a nun, a bishop, a general, a prophet, or a government minister. Such a scenario was unthinkable then.
There would be anarchy. Loss of face was not permitted in those times. I resolved there and then, dysfunctionally, that I would make 30 per day but learn how to deny them to myself and others.
It was soon after this era that misguided medical people began to take increased note of scientific evidence. This regrettable development all but destroyed the noble profession in a decade or two. Some of what the top men had been dogmatising for years to generations could be tasted in horse-apple flavour.
That therapeutic practice of which Doctor X had boasted for 30 years was shown to be way inferior to poisoned placebos. Wonder auscultators in London stopped insisting that they could hear a splitting of the eighth heart sound.
Then the little guy, who should have been seen but not heard, began to speak up. They listened to his thoughts as they had listened to those of the masters. He was often right. And so, much of the world changed. Some parts did not. Religions particularly did every-thing and anything to hold the line. Governments banned free speech. Generals had dissenters executed. Dictators exterminated whole populations.
All of this change occurred in a two-/three-decade span. The question was raised amongst the fear-of-change fraternity, “Is nothing sacred any more?” Indoctrination from cradle to grave had us all thinking that there were many issues that lay beyond our capacity for understanding: “This is a mystery. If you could understand it, it wouldn’t be a mystery.” End of discussion.
Angelus avoidance
The foundations gradually crumbled. It became unnecessary for peons to kiss the archbishop’s ring or stop voiding to say the angelus more respectfully or whisper inflated peccadilloes to the man-in-the-box of a Saturday night or beat the breast in a pre-ordained spirit of inferiority and unworthiness.
Concepts of holiness, sacredness, undiscussability, falling to the knees, deference, mea culpaying, reverence for people-places-things — seen and especially unseen — and concession of personal control all visibly ebbed in the political, medical and religious domains. The Enlightenment had accelerated.
Spectres of sacredness
Not so in every aspect of life or in most parts of the globe. Tyrants, religious and secular, still call the shots in innumerable societies. Populations are consigned to a middle-ages future in countries across the globe where the air is dense with the incorporeal spectres of sacredness, deference, indoctrination, blasphemy, control and manipulation. Extraterrestrial wistfulness dominates visible reality. Fear is the key, the common denominator.
Chapeaux to the men and women who, over the centuries, felt the fear but faced it down in the scientific/medical world, ‘in spite of dungeon, fire and sword’ from establishments. Our inheritance is so much richer, whatever the flaws. We have come a middling good way along the road.