Tell Me, Physician

Bad doctors make good torturers. Not just

because of training in anatomy:

because long training and high station

flatter vanity, and breed resentment

of a truculent humanity, who will 

insist they understand their bodies’ mystery

better than their lettered intercessors,

as they Google diagnoses, or ignore

their pain beyond capacity for healing, or

insist on medication, or dispute classification; as they

waddle, fat, back into surgery regardless

of how many times they’ve been told

to lose weight. And so a doctor learns

to hate, and to desire a new relation

with her patients: one where actions are

dictated and complied with without question.

And such fantasies, when licensed,

overpower with ease the catechistic 

call to do no harm, and so the healer

learns to injure without qualm.

Bad doctors make good torturers, it’s true,

and good doctors are vanishingly few,

so tell me, physician: which are you?

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This poem is dedicated to Kamran Abbasi, Jenifer Block, and all the terverts at the thoroughly captured British Medical Journal, which has decided to run cover for the Nazi-style pseudoscience of the Cass Review, which the not-captured British Medical Association has rightly criticised. It is very clear in this situation who the good doctors are: and they aren't the ones who cross-dress as journalists and like to drive trans kids to suicide to get their jollies.