As I was musing over the effects of the pandemic on my life today, I thought of the several entries on my blog in the series “The Psycholinguistic Pathos of Everyday Life” and decided to revive one from twelve years ago, as follows:

Molière redivivus

I had taken my shirt and jacket off in expectation of having the sutures removed from my back. There was a knock on the door, and a young woman of the usual plumpish bespectacled type wearing a white smock entered and introduced herself as a fourth-year medical student. We shook hands.

She glanced at my file and announced that the result of the biopsy was negative: the tissue sample they had taken two weeks before was benign. When I inquired about the abrasion on my right cheek that had impelled me to visit the dermatology clinic in the first place, she informed me that it was a lentigo, which she mispronounced with stress on the first syllable. I realized, of course, on the model of impetigo, known to me through acquaintance with my grandchildren’s occasional skin problems, that the stress was on the penult and that it rhymed with Sligo, which I had visited once upon a time.

“The team will be in shortly,” added the fourth-year medical student and exited the roomicule. I was left to cool my heels shirtless, in the usual fashion of such momenta medica.

Soon there was another knock on the door, and a woman doctor, a resident who had originally taken the biopsy and sutured the wound, entered, likewise dressed in a white smock, followed by the fourth-year medical student and two male doctors in civvies. This was evidently the aforementioned “team,” and they were making their rounds. Having taken up positions behind me, they all inspected my back simultaneously.

The woman doctor looked cursorily at the file and confirmed the original diagnosis. Then she announced that the “team” would go out to confer about what they had observed. “This is what they used to call a consilium,” I remarked to the fourth-year medical student, who was bringing up the rear as the group exited. That flotsam of Russian vocabulary had suddenly swum up into my cortex and produced the Latin term. Her opaque smile signaled total incomprehension.
Soon the resident and the fourth-year student reentered the room, without the male doctors. “It’s a morphea scleroderma,” intoned the  resident, “and if you want to have it removed you can come back in two weeks.” I declined but pursued the matter of my cheek. “What about the lentigo,” said I,” putting the stress on the proper syllable with its Sligo rhyme. “How did it come about?”

“The lentigo,” she said, repeating the incorrect initial stress, “is probably the cumulative result of exposure to the sun.” “I see,” said I. She then deftly removed my sutures.

“Would you object if I took a photograph of your back?,” asked the dermatologist. “I’d like to have it for the record and to show my colleagues.” “No, I wouldn’t object,” I answered, whereupon she took out a digital camera and snapped it. I saw the flash out of the corner of my eye. Exeunt the two female medicos.

Putting my shirt and jacket back on, I exited the clinic and entered the hall with its quaternion of elevators. One of the male doctors who had examined me, a youngish man in a sports coat, sporting the right sort of Hollywoodian chevelure, entered the elevator with me. “It was like a scene out of Molière,” I said, smiling. Of course, I had misremembered L’Amour Médecin, with its squadron of doctors, conflating it with Le Malade Imaginaire, where a doctor explains that opium is a soporific due to its virtus dormitiva (‘dormitive virtue’). Molière’s doctor was subsequently made the target of derision in the philosophy of science as the utterer of a fallacy but was defended by my hero Charles Peirce, who pointed out the pragmatistic validity of his definition. My memory of Peirce’s discussion had doubtless conjured up the allusion to Molière.

The doctor said nothing. His look of total incomprehension as we descended punctured the afflatus I was feeling at my literary mot juste. My shoulders slumped. We both got off the elevator on the ground floor and walked toward the exit.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO