Hamlet And Medicine

When I started writing, I hid these articles from my family and friends. I wasn't entirely secretive about them — say, writing in the dead of night and switching the screen whenever my wife walked past (she might have thought I was making tissues sticky!) — but neither did I tell anyone close to me.

I was a little embarrassed, to be honest, because you have to start writing before you have any readers, and that makes you feel rather small. I came clean once I had around a thousand subscribers. Ever since, my loved ones have assumed that I spend most of my time struggling with the blank page. I really don't. I actually spend a lot more time reading than I do writing.

I buy everything from books by the most esoteric authors and philosophers, to sci-fi novels aimed at young adults. Having said that, my bookshelves have grown into something of an Umberto Eco anti-library — if I hate something after the first few dozen pages, I stop reading. Consequently, many works by the great and garlanded languish as dust-collecting ornaments, but I've read enough to know that two themes dominate highbrow literature. One is that life is generally awful, the other is that death is probably worse.

Religion has this depressing symphony as well. There is a passage from Hamlet that always gets me: "For who would bear the whips and scorns of time […] But that the dread of something after death". This is from a Christian culture ostensibly taught that the afterlife is paradise. One would have thought Shakespeare's audience were eager to get there.

I think life is awesome. At any rate, I know life has moments that are incomprehensibly joyous and worth savouring. The problem is that such moments are too short and infrequent. I might be biased in my proposed solution — since I’ve spent my life working in healthcare — but I say medicine is the key to happiness.

If you think on all the great moments in life, particularly those that lasted a while — like being a newlywed, or hurtling through your early twenties — I'll bet that illness soured the majority of them. This could be your own illness, or that of a loved one, but think about it.

Actually, think about the nagging fears in the back of your mind. I'll almost guarantee that illness is the biggest monster to haunt your thoughts. That's because your subconscious knows disease will eventually kill you. Were you confident that medicine could cure any ailment, your life would be far less vexed by worry.

Here's what makes me angry. We may not know how to cure every disease, but we do know what's needed to discover treatments. We need an astronomical investment in medical research. Years ago, there was a South Park episode where Cartman gets infected with HIV and purposefully infects Kyle. The two boys go to see Magic Johnson and discover that the cure is to inject a large amount of distilled money into the patient. Nonsense, of course, but metaphorically accurate.

Sickeningly, however, we spend more money researching weapons than treatments. We pour more resources into discovering new ways to kill healthy people, than finding ways to heal the sick. This makes no sense. You might think that Russia, China, [insert whoever your country feels threatened by] is an existential problem, but you're far more likely to get cancer.

And consider that barring fatal injuries, the cure to whatever ultimately kills you is on the other side of a medical breakthrough. You will most likely die, in the moment you do, because medical research didn't get there fast enough to prolong your life. It should be intolerable to everyone that weapons take research precedence. Life must be a higher priority than death.

The great American author Kurt Vonnegut wrote a story that depicts a society so advanced that lifespans have become indefinite. To prevent an over-population crisis, an adult must volunteer to die whenever a child is born. This has no thematic relevance to this article, but it does let me end on a Hamlet gag — the story is titled '2BR02B'.