On Dinner with
an American Physician

A few weeks ago I had dinner with an old friend, an American physician who is a specialist in rehabilitative medicine and now practicing in Miami. During the meal, we talked in the manner of old friends, about common friends, where they were and what they were doing, about our own work and our plans for the future. At one point, a woman with a limp walked past our table and my friend remarked, quite casually, “She should get that hip fixed,” and then returned his attention to his pasta.

Always one for the elegant phrase, I asked, “Huh?” and forced him to explain that he could tell, from the way she walked, shifting her weight in a particular fashion, that she had a serious problem with her left hip, one that could probably be fixed by surgery. That was enough for me and, as we walked back to his hotel after dinner, I asked him to comment on the people who passed us in the street. And so he did, pointing out bad backs, foot problems, and the results of neglected injuries.

One of the discarded scraps of quotation floating in the back reaches of my memory is the Frenchman who once expressed his surprise at discovering that he was speaking prose. I felt a similar surprise at discovering that these people walking by me in what I’d always taken to be a very ordinary way were in fact giving evidence of what in buildings would be called structural problems. My friend, possessed of the expert’s eye, saw through the superficial appearance of the gait to the medical cause; beyond that, he frequently saw the way to correct the problem, very often by surgery, though not always.

On my way home from the hotel, I began to reflect upon the expert’s eye. Those of us who have worked with language for decades have, in a way, acquired a similar skill at diagnosis, though I suspect many of us don’t even realize we possess it.

Just as everyone walks so, too, does everyone write, and in order to do that they’ve got to use language. In so doing, they let slip a great deal that they are unconscious of revealing and often give evidence of deep structural problems. Two examples spring to mind, both of them from papers submitted to me by students.

One man, writing about the birth of his son, had this to say: “After my wife had been in labor for seventeen hours, I got tired of listening to her complain.” Another, after a tedious, badly written description of his wife’s miscarriage, wrote, “In the end, it really wasn’t so bad because it was only a girl.”

Where to begin? Shall we save time and agree from the beginning that both are despicable remarks, the sort of slight tremor that, if the wives in question are to have any luck in life, will lead to the earthquake of divorce? That given, what seemed remarkable to me is the cavalier unconcern with which the writers wrote these things, their apparent belief that no one would or could find them in any way remarkable, beliefs that could result only from a total insensitivity to language and its function. To make no mention of their wives and human life in general.

In an age where meaning has been tossed out in favor of rhetoric, in a time when films are mere concatenations of loud noises and the shedding of human blood, it is to be expected that language should no longer be considered the chief means by which we reveal ourselves, our thoughts, and our feelings. When meaning disappears so, too, must the ability to perceive it.

And thus many people limp along through their verbal lives, entirely unconscious of what they reveal by what they write or say, leaving those with the skilled diagnostic ear to perceive injury or deep structural weakness where they hear or read it. Different from the physician, however, we can do no more than diagnose: we have no power to cure.