I realised that memory is fallible and the nostalgia we have for our youth deforms it further
My 13-year-old son did as 13-year-old sons are wont to do and broke one of his teeth this week while arsing about at school.
So off we went, with many muttered imprecations from me and many muffled responses from him, to get it fixed by an emergency dentist. We had, as is the way of these things, never met this dentist before. And he, it turned out, was old school.
He greeted us unsmilingly. There was no welcoming chat. Just a command to the patient to “Sit down. Lie back.” And then he began. There was no informing us what he was doing or about to do. No putting at ease. No acknowledgement that we were sentient beings, let alone any pretence that we were equals. No nothing. It was like going back in time to my own childhood – the iciest of blasts from the past.
I had forgotten, you see, that it used to be like this. That with doctors and dentists, any kind of medical professional at all, it used to be a very simple relationship. You shut up and did as you were told. They were the experts. You were a person with a problem. They would administer instructions (not advice), issue a prescription if they deemed it necessary (or if dentists, would cause you untold amounts of pain in various unspeakable ways and then send you on your way assuring you you were cured), and you would say thank you and all but back out bowing like you’d just been in front of Louis XIV at Versailles.
Gradually, however, the notion took hold that patients should be told what was happening to them and maybe even why. That just because you were an expert in something shouldn’t necessarily mean that you should treat the non-experts in your care like they were insensible turds.
It was a radical notion but it spread very successfully, probably because there were more non-experts fed up with being treated like insensible turds than there were authoritarian doctors and tooth-drawers and because – even if palsied, fractured or covered in a rash in desperate need of hydrocortisone cream – the invisible hand of the market will have its effects.
It is now absolutely commonto be consulted during a consultation. As a teenager, my son has known no other way than to be greeted by a friendly doctor and spoken to with the respect due to another human being who then goes on to help him and ensure he understands everything that is happening to him and why.
But as I say, I had forgotten all this. I had forgotten this small but profound revolution until I was sitting on a tiny stool with my back against the wall as I watched my son get tenser and tenser in a room full of silence and increasingly threatening looking implements coming towards his face without explanation.
When I saw the large metal syringe heading that way I managed to cast off the paralysis caused by disbelief and tell him that the dentist was about to give him an injection to numb him against… whatever the next thing it was that he was about to do.
Here’s the thing: I habitually rage against the increasing “touchy-feeliness” of the world and the eggshells we all walk on. At the easy offence taken at every little thing. At trigger warnings everywhere (did attendees really need to be given notice at the British Library’s recent exhibition about medieval women it included “content relating to sex and sexuality, pregnancy, birth and baby lost” and the myriad other ills that female flesh has always been heir to, and resources for support offered at the end?). At the existence of emotional support animals. At the stories of police who can’t enter blocks of flats to seize stolen property their owner has tracked there because it might be dangerous. The vast amounts of time and money spent on court cases and employment tribunals about hurt feelings instead of real crimes. The infantilisation of everyone and everything.
I am but a few short months away from letting the words “The world’s gone mad!” past my lips and becoming a full, red-faced, bosom-hoicking member of the anti-wokeness brigade.
But the dentist – and his syringe – pulled me up short. I realised that memory is fallible and the nostalgia we have for our youth deforms it further. The old way of doing this… was bad. A movement away from it began for a reason. Other old ways of doing things were probably not as good as I remember, either. Movements away from them probably began for good reasons too. The way we do many things now is probably better than it used to be.
I don’t say the pendulum hasn’t in many cases swung too far. I still think that if you require coddling through an exhibition that mentions that childbirth was a bit gruesome in the Middle Ages, you might be best advised to stay at home. But overcorrection is part of the process of correction.
I, and my fellow borderline-members of The World’s Gone Mad! club, would do well to remember that. It’s not how far the pendulum swings that matters in the end. It’s where it comes to rest.