16 - 22 August 2001
Issue No.547
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 16 - 22 August 2001 Issue No.547 |
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Monuments to human frailty
Medical specialisations have always been something of a mystery to me which is how I would like them to remain. The ins and outs of the human body's insides are something that has always seemed wise to keep at arms' length and shrouded in mystery. The intimate life of the kidney, the liver or of those other, even more obscure organs the bovine equivalents of which one sometimes sees hanging from hooks in butchers' shops or strung up to tempt the customers of the more disreputable sandwich carts, is something if considered at all should be considered only through rose-tinted glasses, and even then at a safe distance.
There's simply too much to go wrong, too many tubes to collapse or holes to open, too many grown negative bacteria to insinuate themselves in vulnerable tissue to bear thinking about. Which is why the endless rows of apartment buildings emblazoned with signs bearing the names and specialisations of doctors hanging from almost every balcony and usually with an unintelligible string of letters suggesting professional qualifications gained in faraway lands, never really inspire confidence in me. True, they might suggest that were one knocked down at a busy intersection -- anywhere in town -- less than a stone's throw away would be a person qualified to tend to your fractured cranium or crushed spleen, but somehow I suspect it doesn't quite work like that. Knocked down at a busy intersection, you would probably be left exactly where you landed as crowds hurried past you on the pavement, not calling an ambulance because (a) they know it will take an eternity to arrive, if it arrived at all and (b) there is the nagging question of who will pick up the tab.
So instead of inspiring confidence, should disaster strike all these signs -- with their lists of qualifications, acronyms that look a bad Scrabble hand, attached to buildings full to overflowing with such a confusing array of specialties, of men and women possessed of an intimate knowledge of the workings of the lymph gland and its possible problems -- come to appear less like citadels of salvation than monuments to human frailty. They are intimations of mortality, memento mori, gathering dust as they hang, seemingly innocuous but reminding every passer by of the fate that awaits.
It is simple morbidity that makes people scan the signs, the same urge that causes people to be forever playing with a tooth that aches or pressing on spots that are painful. And the truth is, if you read the signs on the buildings, these are far less distressing ones than the medical.
Only last week, scanning the upper stories of Abdel-Khaleq Tharwat Street, I came across the Philatelic Society of Egypt. It was quite a large sign, as dust- blown as any, and somewhat faded. Yet it was still proud, strung between two balconies, where is has probably been hanging for several decades.
No suggestion of failing organs here, or of internal prolapse, merely a happy suggestion of a harmless, and I suspect worthy, pursuit. Hinges, albums, tweezers -- all the paraphernalia of collecting stamps.
Now I would suspect (though it must be stressed that this is only a suspicion, and no one would be happier than I were it to turn out to be false) that the Philatelic Society of Egypt has fallen onto hard times. Indeed, I would be surprised if it still functions at all. The honourary members of the committee are probably all long since passed away, and the secretary last took minutes at the annual general meeting some time in the mid-1950s. And though records of the society's activities do still exist, they probably consist only of dusty newsletters at the bottom of some trunk belonging to the kind of elderly gentleman who cannot bear to throw anything away. Even these, sadly, will disappear soon. One more useless item among the assorted bric-a-brac that families are wont to discard following the demise of an elderly relative. Thus do lives, thus does history, end in the garbage can.
The shutters leading onto the balconies across which the sign was strung looked as if they had not been opened for years. Hardly surprising -- does anyone, after all, collect stamps any more? A decade ago, when I first arrived in Cairo, I remember coming across a shop selling stamps off Adli Street, but it appeared even then to be on its last legs, one of those small businesses -- of which the city is full -- that seems to hang on simply for the sake of hanging on, having long since ceased to resemble anything that an accountant might recognise as constituting a viable enterprise. (There are large ones too.)
Nor is the Philatelic Society of Egypt alone. There are any number of such institutions, probably each as moribund as the next, though still legal entities, no doubt, because their articles of association have never been repealed. The Entomological Society of Egypt occupies one rather impressive two-story building on Ramsis Street. The society's sign, though still legible, is now rather obscured by a much flashier heading advertising the Sadat Academy of Management Sciences. A sign of the times, perhaps, that an organisation dedicated to the study of the nation's insects should have been replaced by one purporting to teach management science.
The nation's insects undoubtedly do exist, and in rather alarming quantities this summer, as well as variety. A tour of my own apartment will reveal several hitherto unsighted species of ant. Would that I could capture samples in a matchbox, and take them to the Entomological Society for identification and, hopefully, tips on the most efficient means of their eradication. (They appear resistant to the more common anti-insect sprays.) But, instead, experts on the subject, as daily encountered as insects, have been replaced by teachers and students of management science. Now, with the best will in the world, I would challenge any reader to claim, hard on heat, that they daily encounter organisations that engage in anything remotely close to scientific management. Insects, in endless profusion, and shocking variety, teem, while entomologists are an endangered species. Students of management science, on the other hand, proliferate, though there is nothing at all for them to manage, and certainly not scientifically. Their particular half-baked skills, are utterly redundant. Which suggests that something, somewhere, is going wrong.
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