The House of God

by Samuel Shem

‘It won’t work,’ said Fats, ‘’cause the worse the Private, the better the bedside manner, and the higher the patient’s regard. If a doctor buys the TV illusion of “the doctor,” so does the patient.

‘What happens if you take it off?’ ‘My eyelids fall down.’ I wrote her a prescription for more tape.

I make them feel like they’re still part of life, part of some grand nutty scheme instead of alone with their diseases, which, most of the time and especially in the Clinic, don’t hardly exist at all.

I’m telling you that the cure is the disease. The main source of illness in this world is the doctor’s own illness: his compulsion to try to cure and his fraudulent belief that he can.

That was how I felt—revolted, enraged, pushing the hand away, because the hand can’t ever help, because it’s a myth that the hand can touch the part that’s dead.

Perhaps they welcomed death like a dear long-lost cousin, grown old but still known, coming to visit, relieving the loneliness, the failing of the senses, the fury of the half-blind looking into the mirror and not recognizing who is looking back, a dear friend, a dear reliever, a healer who would be with them for an eternity, the same eternity as the one long ago, before birth. Wouldn’t that be death, for them?