If symptoms persist...
THE religious sometimes ask what would happen if Christ were to return to earth. In this country, at least, the answer is clear: he would be placed under a section of the Mental Health Act (1983) and taken compulsorily to hospital.
I see about three or four Christs a year, plus one or two Haile Selassies, with a Buddha and perhaps a reincarnation of Alexander the Great thrown in. (One of my patients wished me a Happy Krishna not long ago.) Last week, I received a message that there was a Christ in Maple Crescent and he was threatening to cru- cify himself. His relatives, not surprising- ly, were distraught.
A few weeks previously the Christ of Maple Crescent had received his redun- dancy notice from the factory, and it was this that set him off on his mission to save the world. I arrived at his house with a social worker, whom he immediately mistook for Judas Iscariot and whom he chased, with un-Christlike asperity, from the door. Driving the money changers from the temple, he called it, changing the religious metaphor slightly. Fortu- nately, he still recognised me as a doctor. Did I realise, he asked, that if his feet touched the earth, the whole planet would explode and he, alone of the earth's inhabitants, would land straight in the 27th century?
This was not an easy question to answer; I don't like to lie to my patients, but he was clearly irritated at the refusal of the other residents of Maple Crescent and those whom he called the authorities to recognise his divinity. I answered his question with another question. 'Is it true,' I asked, 'that you spent all last night preaching in the garden?' `My Father gave you this world and everything in it,' he replied. 'And look how you're abusing it. I'm giving you one last chance. . .
His wife, children, sister and brother- in-law were sitting around him, their eyes red-rimmed with the denial of sleep. The Christ of Maple Crescent turned away to his music centre and put on Mantovani and his Orchestra. I asked whether he would agree to take some tablets. 'No,' he said, and I signed my part of the form committing him there.
When the ambulance came, however, he refused to get in it. The police were called, but they wouldn't break into the house without a magistrate's warrant.
I spent the following morning in the magistrates' court. It was a pure formal- ity, of course: the magistrates are forever granting warrants to enter the houses of lunatics. I returned to Maple Crescent where, at No 8, there was a splendid tableau. With curtains open, Christ was hectoring with insane pedantry his family-disciples, who sprawled on sofas and in armchairs, exhausted and bleary- eyed with boredom.
This time, there was no evading his fate, and I am glad to say that the latest news is that he has nearly recovered.
I expect no gratitude, however. As one patient said to me last week, 'The trouble with you doctors is you think you're God.'
Theodore Dalrymple
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