Wednesday, March 04, 2009

State of Mind

There are drugs and/or surgical procedures available to improve your hearing (though not apparently mine) or sight; to help you get to sleep or stay awake; to cheer you up or calm you down; to make you feel and look younger and more attractive; to enhance your “performance” in a variety of fields which I will not detail here.

But as far as I know medicine still comes up short in at least three domains:

  • Death – the latest figures released by the Central Office of Information suggest that 100% of all known people are still dying, and what’s more in large numbers. “Droves” was the expression used by the normally cautious Office to describe the phenomenon.
  • Wealth – Medicine and science in general is strangely silent on this subject. The only major breakthrough dates back to the 1950s and is owed to a company called Ellisdons which rather misleadingly styled itself as “The Largest Mail-Order House for Novelties in the World”. The company, now vanished, proposed a machine for MAKING MONEY. The machine showed great promise but was never properly developed.
  • Intelligence – Here again, medicine is powerless to intervene. I myself am the possessor of a second-class brain (officially classified 2/2, Durham University 1966). I would dearly love to move up a notch but seem doomed to churning out this sort of drivel.

No comments:

Post a Comment

A Few Late Chrysanthedads

No one person's experience of dementia is quite the same as another's, but the account given below, within the confines of a shortis...