Personal views: A medical memoir
Authors: Gordon Graham
Journal: BMJ (2001)

My first encounter with a doctor was when I was two years old. I remember being propped up on the kitchen worktop while he examined (with cold fingers) my private parts. He, or my parents, had decided that I should be circumcised. They did not consult me. I cried.

Throughout my childhood, in the 1920s and 1930s, I had a series of the customary childhood illnesses. My parents became Christian Scientists in 1925 and so, when I fell ill, I was tucked into bed, given warm milk, tender loving care, prayer, and spiritual treatment. There was no medicine in the house. It was a loving, if somewhat Spartan, upbringing.


Schooled in the belief that spiritual healing was natural, I tended to take injuries rather casually. Once, in my teens, I fell off a rock face when I was climbing alone and gashed my leg to the bone. I cycled 30 miles home with a handkerchief over it. When I got home, a fresh handkerchief was substituted. 


This period of illness has been a challenge to my lifelong beliefs



A few weeks after graduating I joined the army, and shortly after that I fell ill. Impounded in the sick bay, I told the medical officer politely that I did not want any treatment. He respected my wishes.

During my six years of war service, I witnessed much disease, injury, and death. I was also introduced to the merits of preventive medicine—inoculations, vaccinations, antimalarial drugs, etc. When 13 men died from tick typhus, drums of dicophane (DDT), in which we soaked our clothes, were flown in.

I was also able to observe at first hand the heroic work of frontline medical officers and their stretcher bearers and first aid assistants, many of whom were killed in the field. I formed a friendship with the battalion medical officer, Peter Barkey, a quiet, intellectual Catholic. His approach to medical practice was holistic, before that word even became popular. Peter was killed by a machine gun bullet as we crossed the Irrawaddy in 1945.

I was not wounded during the war, but was ill twice. Treatment of disease in field hospitals was mainly rest, hygiene, and good nursing. Matching these experiences and observations against my upbringing, I formed a personal philosophy: we are spiritual beings temporarily inhabiting physical frames. Accordingly, the body prospers best with the least intervention.

Until I reached the age of 80, this philosophy seemed to serve me well. Perhaps I was fortunate. I recall only a few occasions when I had ailments of any seriousness.

In 1948 in Bombay, I fell ill with a throat infection. After recovering a doctor told me that it had been diphtheria and that I should have my tonsils removed. I reluctantly agreed but fainted in his anteroom. He pronounced me unfit to be operated upon. I never went back.

In 1952 on a house boat in Kashmir, I had another throat infection and, I think, altitude sickness. Looked after by my wife and the Kashmiri bearer who supplemented his prayers by putting a bun under my pillow, I recovered in about 10 days, without medical help.

In 1963 in New York, I fainted in the office and bashed my nose. I was under stress because I was about to change jobs. The company doctor could find nothing wrong. I recovered over a period of a month or so and resolved not to get emotionally involved in my work again. I never did.

These were the highlights of my medical history until October of last year, when I returned from Italy with back pain and a virus. This was different. It was like travelling on an open road that suddenly disappeared. The vehicle began to malfunction and did not right itself. I was no longer in control, and surrendered myself to a regimen of tests and drugs. I was off duty (but not in bed) for a month, and since then have been operating at a reduced, but gradually improving, tempo. Age? Maybe, in part. Anyway, I have joined suffering humanity and learned what chronic disease is. This has enabled me to learn at first hand about the practice of medicine.

Ivan Illich's The Limits to Medicine (London: Marion Boyars, 1976) was both a revelation and a comfort, since it confirmed much that I had believed intuitively. Medicine and its practitioners have achieved great wonders, but have also developed new limitations. Drug companies have become bigger and richer. Doctors have become overworked, but coping rather than healing. The patient (Latin “patior”, I suffer) is asked to put his faith in the drug more than in the doctor (Latin for teacher). Patients have become less respectful. Doctors are afraid of malpractice. The differences between traditional medicine and the increasingly confident “alternative” systems have become more pronounced.

This period of illness, combined with study, reading and reflection, has naturally been a challenge to my lifelong beliefs. I find myself in the position of not simply seeking to recover my health (although that “would be nice,” as Gandhi said of Christianity), but of gaining a better understanding of the meaning of health (Anglo-Saxon for “wholeness”).