“Let me state up front, Doctor Normal is a fine man. On first meeting Doctor Normal, who seemed amiable enough, if intense, we decided we liked him. Doctor Normal was thorough. Doctor Normal took his time. Doctor Normal followed through with requests. Doctor Normal made us feel like, in the realm of his doctoring specialty, he knew what he was talking about.
But then one day Doctor Normal used the word “normal.” Something like, Well, in a normal situation…”
— Heather Kim Lanier “Breaking Up With Doctor Normal”
When my friend Heather takes her daughter Fiona to the doctor he only understands her developmental disabilities by setting them against a normal child’s life. Imagine! The poor doctor is bewitched! He thinks there are normal children!
The bewitched doc obviously doesn’t get out much.
We might suggest he read some passages from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Democracy isn’t tidy and normalcy is hard to locate outside the dark warren of human thought. “Its difference we celebrate doctor!” (“Still it would be marvelous to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,” —Pablo Neruda) Doc Norm is scared of Fiona—she’s a cut lily in a law office.
In the doctor’s imagination birth and death are equidistant from “normal”.
In the doctor’s imagination the unchangeable losses of childhood are “normal” but never the changeable losses—the latter are too much work to contemplate. How disabled children may prosper is the subject of life itself. “Normal” allows him to forget the largest share of existence. Poor doc! Cut lilies and dreams of talking oak trees surely must frighten him out of his wits.
Its not enough to say Doc Normal is a symptom. (Though he is.) Not enough to say he represents neo-Victorian medicine. (Though of course he does.) Doc is a member of the mildewed mob of badly educated physicians and health care workers who cannot imagine patients as being other than their symptoms.
One sees this with ophthalmologists. Ask a group of blind people what their experience with eye doctors was like and they will invariably tell you that the doc said: “I’m sorry. There’s nothing more I can do for you.”
There’s no life after blindness. No opportunity. No spirit. No joy. No family. No diamond. No hat. No honey. No green grass. You see, they didn’t discuss this at medical school.
I once gave a lecture to a gaggle of baby eye doctors at Johns Hopkins University. While I was talking about the social construction of disability and why you have to see the whole patient, they were reading their mail, checking their palm pilots—this was just before the introduction of the iPhone. They figured I had a guide dog and wouldn’t know. My appearance was just some tedious exercise in political correctness.
O the primal yawn that brings forth the writs of this world.
O Doc Normal, with your sensitive Narcissus face.
Planet of the Blind 