Last call.(THE STRAGGLER)(old age)

THE college I attended had a large teaching hospital attached, so I spent many hours of my youth socializing with medical students. They were an amiable crowd on the whole, though my reverence for the medical profession never quite recovered from the spectacle of half a dozen of Britain's future neurosurgeons and cardiologists at the Wheatsheaf pub around closing time attempting to belch "God Save the Queen!" in chorus.

Well, I recall a conversation with a medical student who had just completed his final exams and was contemplating further study in some specialized area of medical practice. He was very knowledgeable about all the specialties, about the intraprofessional prestige of each, their various remunerations and opportunities. He was personally attracted towards dermatology--a thing I found surprising, as the prospect of a lifetime spent inspecting other people's pimples and rashes did not seem to me to be very appealing at all. Ah, he replied with unanswerable logic when I mentioned this, but the dermatologist gets very few night calls.

What, I asked this fellow, was the least popular specialty among his classmates, when they discussed these issues among themselves? He replied without any pause for thought at all: geriatrics.

It is not hard to see why this should be so. The conscientious medical doctor wants to help people stay in the world, not to ease their passage out of it. The ailments characteristic of old age are in any case mostly incorrigible, so that the general atmosphere of terminal gloom that fills the doctor's workday is made darker yet by the knowledge that not much of what he does will have any effect. Pity the poor geriatrician.

Pity even more his patients. Old age is too often a cruel and degrading business, and there does not seem to be any prospect that this will soon change. Death is of course the great leveler; but for those of us who reach old age, the leveling process may begin years before the end. We have all known vigorous and intelligent people reduced to shuffling incoherence by the aging process, at one with those lame and dimwitted folk past whom they sped so breezily in former days. "Now she is like the others," said Charles de Gaulle at the graveside of his Downsyndrome child. Visit an old folks' home, as I did recently, and gaze upon the socialist ideal of human equality at the other end of life.

The 20th century's great poet of death, Philip Larkin, wrote a poem titled "The Old Fools"; not easy to read, even if you are accustomed to Larkin's unsparing approach.

 
   ... do they fancy there's really been no 
   change, 
 
   And they've always behaved as if they 
   were crippled or tight, 
 
   Or sat through days of thin continuous 
   dreaming 
 
   Watching light move? If they don't (and 
   they can't), it's strange: 
 
   Why aren't they screaming?