Do you ever find yourself longing for a good, old fashioned 19th century illness? Perhaps you’ve been reading Susan Sontag and you’re feeling ever so swoonish in your whale bone corset or your itchy Czarist underwear with the hundred mother of pearl buttons. Anyway the point is that you’re just not feeling yourself. Don’t you long for the days when, out of sorts, half crippled with malaise you could go to Herr Doktor and he, pink, hirsute, bespectacled, well fed, well furnished would talk to you for over an hour because after all you were always beautiful whether you were a boy or a girl, man or woman. You were always impossibly beautiful to Herr Doktor who would give you a glass of good Russian tea and talk to you as the twilight filled the tall windows and the Egyptian figurines seemed to move slightly in the deepening shadows. Of course there was something wrong with you. Something carved like mahogany but far inside. Something stained and sequestered like the frame of a hidden door. And Herr Doktor would know enough not to open it. All he had to do was make you feel like a reasonable neighbor and accordingly charge very little. Going home you could watch the orphan boys light the gas lamps with their long tapers.Yes. Those were the days.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
Your writing often leaves me gasping with wonder over its sheer evocative beauty. Your ability to weave poetic imagery and emotional intensity into your prose is a powerful inspiration, Stephen. Thank you.
LikeLike
It’s her AIDS writing that resonated with my generation–AIDS and its metaphors. That stigma may be lessening among some–I think people just have to apply it to other areas.
Having read a fair amount about 19th century medicine, I’d be reluctant to place my well being in those physicians’ hands and would be likely to start tearing down the yellow wallpaper, though the longed-for sense of normalcy you describe, that one is a reasonable neighbor, yes. My grandmother misses having an old country doctor and does not like all the ways in which medicine has changed.
The style of this is interesting, evokes Dubliners at the end with the boys and gas lamps.
LikeLike
As always thought provoking. Sadly I must point out that Sontag’s wonderful writing is dated. It simply does not resonate with college students. The students I teach just don’t get it. Stigma is no longer attached to cancer nor is it perceived to be a deaths sentence. I have students tell me lots of people live with cancer, kids they knew growing up had cancer, and are puzzled by the term cancer survivor. Stigma and cancer no longer go together. Get with the times old man!
LikeLike