The Abstainer
Reading Honor Croome's article concerning the statistics of medicine-taking in last week's Spectator, I began to wonder how many people—as long as their luck holds– go through their adult life without ever taking any medicine at all, not even a dose of salts. I suspect that there are many more of them than you might think, but the only one I know about is myself. In a normal year my total consump- tion of medical supplies (other than an occasional bit of sticking-plaster, which hardly counts) varies between two aspirins and nil. It is true that in 1947, when I broke rnY pelvis, I seem to remember getting through a certain amount of pentathol or something of the kind; and journeys to the tropics in each of the following years must have involved me in inoculations. But on the whole I must be—in this rather specialised respect—something very like a model citizen, and I am slightly saddened by the thought that, economicallY, my status in the coinmunity corresponds closely to that Of the drunkard, the revenue from whose excesses shields the disapproving teetotaller from an increase in his income tax.
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