You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Your beano with the patient who is alleged to have been negligently treated reminds me of one of my old chiefs – Bill Williams – who said, “The first thing you do before touching a fracture is be sure your malpractice insurance is in good shape; then have it X-rayed; set it; X-ray it again and damn the expense. Unfortunately you can only do the first thing in my job and the rest is in the lap of the gods. One of the first cases I had – of course it is when you are most vulnerable at the beginning of your career, and then when you are vulnerable because you are senile – was a paranoid girl who wanted to sue me. Luckily the malpractice people in England are very unflappable and unless you are patently guilty of being a nit-wit they stand by you. However, it is nasty while it lasts and heaven knows what a welfare state does for a doctor. Anyway an early inoculation stands you in good stead, unless of course the inoculation becomes inflamed.
We went out to dinner and had a very enjoyable and peculiar evening. Where, I wonder, outside a Jewish party, would time be taken up reading Keats's ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, two Shakespeare sonnets, two Milton sonnets; discussing the prospect of death; the preoccupation with the same; and the very noisy description of ‘How I caught my husband’ by the wife of an eminent cultural historian who has just completed (at age 92) the last, umpteenth volume of his history of cultural development? She was then so vulgarly and noisily offensive to Dr B. (who had been telling me about his medical care of and social friendship with Stravinsky) that he and his wife left the party in a rage.
At the end the hostess said how much she had missed the chance of speaking to me, though I was seated on her right hand through dinner! She was quite right of course – the racket was so great!
The path of true love is punctuated with divorce as well as marriage; the problem is, when? Before, after or during? It is a decision which is made by two people, both – odd