Zapurja, Pune by Shirish Beri

Clinical Practice Today

When i must be around 7 to 12 years of age, and when a sickness would necessitate a doctor's visit, we would visit our neighborhood clinic. The ritual would be to take a number from the compounder and wait for your turn. As you entered the cabin, an old man with greying hair would greet and almost immediately ask to lay on the examination bed. This bed would be at waist height or higher, and could only by climbed via two steps. The mattress would be made up of leather, or even faux leather. Mostly we would be accompanied by our mothers who would explain to him the key symptoms. Then the doctor, in a firm voice would ask: 

"Bhook lagti hai?" (Do you feel hungry?)

"Khana peena barabar hai?" (Are you eating well?)

"Sandaas, peshab?" (Stools, urine?)

At the time, i never knew that what we eject from our body could be of so much value to someone. Rather, i would be embarrassed to share those details. Then there would be a laying on the bed and the stethoscope ritual. Breathe in, out, while the doctor hears your chest. These are precisely the acts we perform when we buy one of those toy doctor sets. Then, he would ask to open the mouth, and using the old style steel battery torch, look inside for inflammations of the throat or tonsils. The meticulous order of check up was customary for perhaps everyone suffering from fever or cold. After the procedure, he would write a prescription and none other than the dear compounder sitting just outside in his special cubicle would be waiting to make a pack of tablets. 

I used to enjoy seeing the compounder count his colourful tablets. The colours were always lovely - muted or bright. Sometimes he would break some tablets to make appropriate dosage. I would dread having medicinal syrups. Back then i didn't have the agency to tell the doctor to not give me syrups. These syrups also would be available with the compounder himself. I always thought these must be special, for you can't buy them in a medical shop. Perhaps this aspect also consoled me of having visited a doctor an availed his services. The compounder would take a strip of paper and fold it, and cut the edges diagonally to make a hexagonal pattern. This would be quickly stuck onto a glass bottle that mother's would already carry in anticipation. The pattern on the bottle demarcated the syrub dosage one had to take. The colourful tablets would be packed in a mini envelop that would mostly be made out of brown paper. Such a process would complete the journey to the doctor. The total cost would be 20 rupees.

I am 36 now. Visiting the general physician never leaves me in a happy state. In bigger hospitals, the money has to be paid upfront, and in private clinics it is always a bitter surprise in the end. You enter the cabin. To find the doctor who is more often than not finishing a call or checking their WhatsApp message. While doing so, and even without making an eye contact, he begins his inquiry. In 3 to 4 questions he is ready with his prescription. Over these one and a half minutes you may not even get a chance to look at him on the eye. The doctor's job is done and you are expected to leave. No questions asked, no clarifications expected.

I don't know where such doctors come from and what is their motivation to be a doctor. While i have the agency of voicing my pathological condition today, no doctor seemingly is interested in listening. They do not want to speak or investigate. They do not want to examine you physically at all. I hardly see them using their stethoscopes...if a doctor cannot make space for the patient to converse, the doctor is a sheer failure. He has lost, in my eyes, any respect for occupying the seat he does. These men and women, medical practitioners, may be overworked, uninterested, burdened or just far too bored to listen to a patient repeating the same symptoms as the previous one. However, the art of conversation can relieve any disturbed mind of their pain, at least temporarily. I don't know why i was comfortable with those old school doctors. Perhaps they gave me my due time. I feel cheated every time i visit a general physician in a clinic or hospital today. They are rude, reticent and reserved - who have no empathy with their patients. Perhaps such are doctors in an urban place like Mumbai. Maybe other places may have their own problems. 

I visit doctors today due to the guilt my parents give me. They believe i don't visit doctors when i should, and i don't complete my medicine courses. Perhaps both of these aspects could be true. However this attitude towards the medicine is a rejection to the attitude of indifference and un-empathy that is lent in their first meeting, which puts me in a place of deep mistrust for their prescription. How can a doctor who has not looked at me in the eye, not checked my temperature, not heard my breath, not checked my heart beat get to know what i could be suffering from? On what basis does he write those quick prescriptions with so much confidence? No doctors explain what medicines they are giving to their wards. The only thing they explain is the times at which the must be administered to the body. This kind of apathy leaves me baffled. What kind of a relationship is this, and how is the patient expected to follow such jargonized prescriptions blindly? These are aspects I fail to follow about the medical practitioners. 

I keep thinking about this a lot and i would like some doctors to tell me what are my rights to ask a doctor as a patient, and how can I tackle defensive doctors who create a wall of medical tests (again without explaining) as a way to keep their patients in darkness? Some leads will be useful.

Bodies Unprotected

notes from the introduction to a session of Bodies, un-protected, an international program series that Sandra Noeth was curating in close collaboration with Anna Wagner and the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt/Germany (www.mousonturm.de). it is dedicated to the (un)protection of bodies: which bodies are worth protecting (to us) and on what basis? Which bodies will we campaign for and which ones elude our notice and action?

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Bodies, un-protected highlights the unequal distribution of bodily protection from different artistic, historical and theoretical perspectives by bringing together experts come from a variety of fields of research and practice to engage with how we can use aesthetic, performative and discursive means to create visibility for diverse bodies and their specific protective needs. The project unfolds over the course of ten months and manifest itself in two programmes of public events in at the beginning of the project (November 2021) and its end (July 2022). In between these two phases, further events modules are taking place in an international context. They are a crucial part of the project that aims at opening up the discussion to different perspectives, practices and realities.
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Charkop