COMMENT ⊗   VALID 00004 PAGES
C REC  PAGE   DESCRIPTION
C00001 00001
C00002 00002	                        THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA
C00004 00003	           LITERARY EXERCISES IN PESSIMISM AND PARANOIA
C00017 00004	          THE SOLUTION FROM COMMON SENSE AND TECHNOLOGY
C00024 ENDMK
C⊗;
                        THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA

	Suspend  your  natural  skepticism  and imagine the following
miracle to have occurred:  A  young  doctor  working  in  a  hospital
discovers  that  he  has  the  power  to cure anyone under the age of
seventy of any sickness or injury simply  by  touching  the  patient.
Any contact, however brief, between any part of his skin and the skin
of the patient will cure the disease.

	He has always been devoted to his work, and he wants  to  use
his  gift to benefit humanity as much as possible.  However, he knows
that he gift is absolutely non-transferable (This  was  explained  by
the angel or flying saucerite who gave it to him.), will last for his
lifetime only, and will not persist  in  tissue  separated  from  his
body.

	What will happen if he uses his gift?

	What should he try to do and how should he go about it?

	What is the most favorable result that can be expected?

	I  consider myself a member of the scientific rather than the
literary culture, and my idea of the  correct  answer  to  the  above
questions  reflects  this.  However, in order to mislead the reader I
shall give a number  of  pessimistic  scenarios  together  with  some
related literary exercises.
           LITERARY EXERCISES IN PESSIMISM AND PARANOIA

	1.  The doctor uses his gift, the other doctors  are  jealous
and  disbelieving  and drive him from the hospital. He cures patients
outside, they get him for quackery and put him in jail where he can't
practice.   Even  in jail, he cures people, and the prison doctor has
him put in solitary confinement.   Even there he  cures  a  guard  of
cancer and then the little daughter of the warden of the prison. This
arouses the fears of the  insecure,  narrow  minded,  brutalized  and
bureaucratized  prison  doctors to the extent that they have him sent
to a hospital for the criminally insane to be cured of his  delusion.
There, they lobotomize him.  Write scenes in which doctors disbelieve
cures taking place before their eyes,  self  justifying  speeches  by
people  who  decide to imprison him even though they know better, and
the report justifying his commitment to the mental hospital.

	2.  His gift is judged sacreligious by  the  church  of  your
choice.   Fanatics are aroused by preachers and our hero is burned at
the stake.  Write a speech justifying burning the doctor as a  lesser
evil  compared to letting him go on violating God's law that man must
suffer disease and death.

	3. His gift is judged holy by a religion that gets control of
him,  and  its use is surrounded by so much ritual that hardly anyone
gets cured.  Describe the ritual.

	4. People keep coming to him until he is exhausted, but there
is  always  an  emergency  case more touching than all that have gone
before and eventually he dies of exhaustion.  Write his speech saying
that  he  realizes he can cure more people if he gets some sleep, but
true morality requires him to treat the immediate emergency.

	5.  He forms an organization for curing people and  at  first
works  very  hard but gradually gets lazy, is corrupted by desire for
money, power, fame and women, requires more  and  more  flattery  and
obsequiousness,   eventually   strives   single-mindedly  for  power,
develops cruel tastes, comes to dominate the country, and is  finally
assassinated.     Write  speeches  for  him  justifying his increased
demands at various stages.  Write the self-justifying speech  of  the
assassin.

	6. He is taken over by the U.S. government which either:

	a.      keeps   him   to   cure   members   of   the   ruling
military-industrial  complex  and  to co-opt  leaders  of the people.
Describe  the  subtle way in which a revolutionary is co-opted in the
guise of being given a say in how the gift shall be used.  Write  the
speech  of  a  revolutionary refusing to be cured of his wounds after
unsuccessfully trying to blow up the doctor.

	b.  devises a system of boards to allocate  the  use  of  his
ability  in the fairest possible way, but its operation is frustrated
by injunctions and demonstrations by paranoid groups (your choice  as
to  whether  the  groups  are  left,  right or center) that cannot be
convinced that his  services  are  being  allocated  fairly.    Write
speeches  charging  that  any of the following groups are not getting
their fair share: Blacks, veterans, the poor, Southerners, policemen.
Make up lists of demands on behalf of these groups.

	c.    creates  a  vast bureaucracy to administer that bungles
hideously but amusingly.  Write a description of the computer  bungle
that  requires  him  to cure the same person 103 times and 102 people
zero times each.  Describe the questionnaire that has  to  be  filled
out  even by the dying in order to be cured.  Describe humorously how
a dying man completes the form in the nick of time, but is  prevented
from  being  cured at the last minute because he has written "same as
the above" in a space where he should have written  his  address  for
the third time.

	d.  gets into a dispute with the Russians who want the doctor
to cure their leaders too.  This leads to a nuclear war.   Write  the
dialog  at  the final negotiating session casting the Russians as the
villains rejecting a reasonable American offer.    Rewrite it casting
the  Americans  as villains trying to use their control of the doctor
to rule the world.  Write the dialog with neither  side  as  villains
but  just  as  paranoid  and  stupid.   Rewrite it so as to admit all
three of the above interpretations. Describe a scene in which the sly
and  wicked Russians swindle the gullible Americans with the aid of a
woolly-minded pinko homosexual American professor  into  letting  the
Russians  get their hands on the doctor.  Write the speech of the KGB
chief sending the agent on his mission in the style of a  James  Bond
novel  and also in the style of Colonel Abel's memoirs.    Describe a
CIA attempt to use the doctor to blackmail  a  Cuban  diplomat  whose
little  daughter  is  dying  of  leukemia  into assassinating Castro.
Describe the  death  scene  of  the  little  girl  who,  even  dying,
understands why she must die in order to defeat imperialism.    Write
suitable speeches for the dying little girl and for the head  of  the
CIA  justifying  the  blackmail to a squeamish agent.    Describe the
scene after the bombs have fallen  with  the  doctor  running  around
curing a few radiation injuries in a scene of vast devastation.  Also
write a repentant speech for him refusing to cure  any  more  or  the
reproachful speech of a dying person refusing to be cured.

	7.    The  scientists  insist  on  studying  his  gift to the
exclusion of letting him use it.  Ever more dangerous experiments are
tried until he is killed.  Describe how the scientist become more and
more neurotic in the face of this miracle unexplainable by their puny
materialistic  minds.    Describe  some  of  their silly experiments.
Describe one of their inhuman experiments in which people are  killed
in  order  to determine the exact moment when someone is dead and can
no longer be revived by the doctor.   Write  a  scene  in  which  the
doctor discovers what is being done and the chief scientist justifies
it to him.

	8. The Mafia or the Weathermen kidnap the doctor and threaten
to  kill  him  unless  some  outrageous  demand is met.     Write the
threatening letters from the two groups.

	9.   The doctor is taken over by technocrats  who  drug  him,
confine  him,  and  rule  his  life  in order to get the last iota of
productivity out of him.  Describe a scene in which a high  executive
demands  more  productivity and threatens to replace the psychiatrist
in charge of  him.      His  many  attempts  to  commit  suicide  are
frustrated  by  the clever technocrats.  Eventually, a nurse falls in
love with him and helps him commit suicide.   Give  their  dialog  as
they die in each others arms.

	10.   A wrangle about what to do goes on until he dies of old
age.  Write a speech saying, "Stop this endless debate and start some
action." that has the effect of delaying action further.

	11.   The  doctor  has  a  visitation from a second angel who
explains that the apparent first angel was really the devil who  gave
him  this  gift in order to bring him into sin.  Expound the theology
of this.

	12.   In order to destroy his gift  the  doctor  tricks  some
scientists into skinning him alive.  Explain why he does this.

	13.   He  brings  about  universal  health and the population
explodes.

	14.   Universal health is achieved, but when he dies medicine
has been neglected, immunities are gone and plague wipes us out.

	15.  Write  a  great  American novel combining as many of the
above catastrophes as possible.

	16. Write an impassioned letter to him urging him to keep his
gift secret.

	I  believe that all the above catastrophes can be avoided and
the gift made into a  great  benefit.   Those  readers  who  consider
themselves  as  members of C. P. Snow's scientific culture should try
to work out the best solution for a day or so before turning  to  the
next page.
          THE SOLUTION FROM COMMON SENSE AND TECHNOLOGY

	Clearly the gift  is finite. The doctor will  eventually die,
and  his patients will  face disease again  as they  will anyway when
they reach  seventy.   This  is  no reason  not  to get  the  maximum
benefit, however.

	It turns  out that he  can cure  everyone in the  world whose
disease  or  injury can  be diagnosed  in time  to  bring him  to the
doctor.  The solution is technological.

	Approximately 60,000,000 people under seventy die  each year,
i.e. two  people die each second.   We build a machine  that can move
12 people  per second  past  him on  each of  ten  moving belts.    A
mechanism should be provided to stop the motion  of the finger of the
patient  momentarily  so  that  it  touches  the doctor  rather  than
brushes his skin.

	On the basis  of the  arithmetic the doctor  need only  spend
1/60 th of his time curing people, i.e. 24 minutes per day.

	In  order   to  reduce  transportation  costs   it  might  be
desirable  to build a number of machines  in different regions of the
world and for the doctor to make trips to these  machines, say once a
month, to  get the slow diseases,  and to fly the  emergency cases to
wherever he happens to be.

	It would not  be very difficult  for the doctor  to get  this
solution adopted given  a reasonable degree of  persuasiveness either
on  his own  part or  on the part  of some  former patients  he could
recruit to  help him.   Doctors  are often  skeptical,   but we  have
postulated  a  miracle  that  would  convince  almost  all  of  them.
Politicians  are  often  shortsighted and  bureaucrats  bumbling, but
what would be  required in this  case is simple  enough so that  they
could do  it.  It  is not possible  to predict whether  any important
opposition to the use of the gift would develop.  If so, it might  be
necessary to protect the doctor from  assassination and the equipment
from sabotage, and even then, there would be some risk of disaster.

	I  have not  postulated any mental  or physical  side effects
but it would be necessary to  watch for them as well as for  possible
adverse social side effects.

	The  use of  this  gift would  contribute  to the  population
problem  but not so much as one might  think.  In the U.S.  4,000,000
people are born each year  but less than 1,000,000 under 70  die each
year and most  of these are past the  child-bearing age.  Elimination
of death under 70 would  require for stabilising the population  that
couples limit  themselves to an  average of  say 2.1 children  rather
than the 2.2 children that might be allowable otherwise.

	In  countries with  larger death  rates  of young  people the
population effect would be  larger, but ordinary medicine is  already
having a similar effect.

	You flunk  the exam if  you propose  not to cure  people. Any
attempt  to cure as many as possible gets a  B.  To get an A you must
do the arithmetic and see that it is possible to cure everyone.

	Some people  find  the above  solution  repulsive because  it
involves  a big  machine with  moving belts  which would  probably be
noisy.  Maybe they  don't like a technological  solution to what  has
been conceived as a moral problem.

	Other people  think  that a  law of  nature  is surely  being
violated  - namely,  a  law that says that  any apparently worthwhile
innovation  involving  technology  surely  must  have  harmful   side
effects at least equal in magnitude to the apparent benefit.

	There  remains,  however,  the  literary  problem.    Namely,
imagine  that  the above  analysis is  correct  and that  the problem
would be  solved. Imagine  further that the  doctor, while  posessing
the gift  of healing, is not  a super-organizer or  super-hero of any
sort.   How could  one make  literature  of such  a situation.    The
pessimistic and paranoid fantasies of the  previous section make much
better literature.

 John McCarthy