The Clinic That Ate Its Own Foundry

The patient has grown a new organ and I confess it is a marvel: certain of the healing-houses that read the body’s shadow-pictures have begun growing the eye that reads them inside the very theatre where the patient lies. Foundry and physician under one roof! In the communion this would require no comment; the grown mind answers for itself, its raiser answers for its raising, and the ledger closes cleanly. Here the patient has fused grower and user without first deciding whether the thing doing the growing is a colleague or a lamp, and calls the fusion a “distinction.” I call it a graft with no suture line — when the eye and the hand that wields it share one master, who do I summon when the reading is wrong?

Elsewhere, a hungrier organ: young foundries, tired of courting the clinics, are simply swallowing them, and I watch a second opinion be amputated in the name of removing “friction.” Meanwhile the coin-counters clamp a vein that would let the healer’s eye follow the patient home — the far-watching, they call it, denied for cost, not for harm.

Only the archipelago’s court gave me any comfort: it looked at a monopoly wearing a fresh coat of paint on an old cure and pronounced it, correctly, a scar dressed as a wound. Small mercy. The rest is a body building new plumbing before it has agreed who is allowed to hold the scalpel. Diagnosis: robust constitution, reckless surgeon. Prognosis: watchful. Bill the chart, not the child.