Second opinion

AS investors in the stock market know, timing is everything. This is also true of medical consultations. It so happens that everyone who consults me does so past the peak of his problems, at least with regard to smoking and drinking.

'Do you smoke?' I ask the patient.

'Yes, doctor, but not as much as I used to,' he replies.

The strange thing is that I've never met anyone who smokes as much as he used to. I can only conclude, therefore, that it is cutting down on smoking that harms people and drives them to consult their medical advisers.

Heroin addicts are much the same. I ask them why they take the beastly stuff.

'I don't know,' they all reply. 'I suppose I got in with the wrong crowd.'

Who are they, the wrong crowd? I never seem to meet them in the flesh; I only hear about them through the people who get in with them. Sometimes I feel there is a vague but vast conspiracy by the Wrong Crowd to corrupt our youth, but this cannot be the case, because our youth is corrupted by the age of three at the very latest.

Perhaps you can tell that I don't love humanity, at least in its modern British instantiation. Misanthropes have the virtue at least of consistency, unlike philanthropes, who love humanity in gener

al. Misanthropes love humanity neither in particular nor in general, and are far from supposing that an aggregate of vices, weaknesses and follies composes something noble and admirable. What a piece of work is a man, indeed: only those who know nothing of life can even pretend to love mankind.

One of my patients last week had tried to kilt herself.

'I was all right,' she said, 'until I met my boyfriend.'

'What's wrong with him?' I asked.

'He's cruel, mentally cruel.'

'In what way?'

'He tells me he goes into the toilet at lunchtime at work, with the women there, and shows them his bits and pieces.'

My next patient was an attractive girl of 16 who — unlike most girls of her age and class — looked mentally alert. But her boyfriend, 17 years older than she, was a rotter: shaven-headed, tattooed, with more rings in his face than a curtain rail. This is what is known in Britain as being yourself. Naturally he hit her, put his hands round her throat to throttle her and punched other men in the pub who so much as glanced at her, to prove his undying love for her. He was, of course, flagrantly unfaithful to her.

'You're thinking of having his baby,' I said.

'Yes, how did you know?'

'Girls in your situation always are.'

'I thought it might change him.'

'But, then again, it might not. Why find out?'

'Everyone deserves a second chance.' 'Even Adolf Hitler?'

'He says he wants my baby.'

'First he will try to procure an abortion by kicking you in the stomach, and then, if that doesn't work, he will abandon you either two months before or two months after the baby's birth. He wouldn't want to waste his money on his child, now would he? And then you will be put into a 17th-floor flat with a chronic schizophrenic on one side and a drug dealer on the other, with an income of £27.81 a week to live on.'

If going down on my knees would have averted her fate, I would have done it.

'I'll think about it,' she said.

She won't, of course; she'll feel about it.

Theodore Dalrymple