My mother is a doctor —and she always has been, at least in this time that is my life.
It never occurred to me that she was a doctor;
moreover, if she believed it, my biography would have to begin by recounting my birth from a male womb: a magical birth, a prodigy that would allow me to compete, at last, with the immaculate conception of the late Catholics.
It seems unlikely, but it wasn't that far: if my mother were Spanish, she would be a doctor and I would be a miracle.
And I know, right here, a number of miraculous children of female doctors who define their occupation as masculine.
The word
doctor
comes from afar: the root, they say, is that Indo-European
med
that already before the Latin
medicus
meant to care and think, from where doctor, remedy, meditate.
And yet, for much of history, doctors enjoyed their well-earned reputation for being lethal.
Master Quevedo, without going any further, used to pay homage to them: "He is an honest doctor, / by the grace of the Lord, (...) / whoever painted him as a coward / does not know him, and lied, / who has killed more living men / that the Cid Campeador killed”, he said, and that, among other delicacies, “he does not eat to gain weight / nor for the sweet taste / but to kill his hunger, / which is to kill his inclination”.
Those quacks, it is true, were also victims of superstition: the church of Rome forbade them almost everything.
Little by little they began to defy his commandments and began to rummage through bodies: for this they stole corpses, opened them, tried to understand them.
The experimental method sought its senses.
Around 1540 Vesalius produced the first complete anatomical description, Harvey in 1630 defined blood circulation, Hunter in 1750 detailed obstetrics, Lavoisier around 1770 discovered the mechanism of respiration and oxygenation, Jenner in 1795 created the first vaccine.
With difficulties, with ups and downs, medicine built its empire.
She was not alone: in the middle of the 19th century, science took over the world: progress became the great Western religion and the clinic was one of its most powerful pillars.
"Tell me, doctor, am I going to live then?"
“Sure, my friend, what I can't tell you is how much.
Since then, medicine has never stopped its advances and has reached incredible levels.
The best possible measure of progress is to his credit: that we now live much longer than before.
If it weren't for antibiotics,
bypasses
, transplants and chemotherapies, many people we meet every other day would be raising daisies from below: it's quite an achievement.
But in return, doctors have generally become little dictators brimming with good intentions: the worst.
The medical corporation controls an abstruse knowledge, made up of secrets inaccessible to ordinary mortals: a knowledge that is critically essential for us in order not to be too mortal, that is, to be subordinated.
And they take advantage or do not know how to act in another way and the so-called patient is not in a position to doubt anything because he doubts everything, he is scared to death and that man in a duster is his only link to survival: the last hope of the.
So he complies and clings and nods and agrees and hopefully.
For all of which there are few powers as solid, in our societies, as the one they exercise.
And that what they do, basically, is to apply their statistics: in 68% of the cases such a remedy cures such disease, let's say;
remains, more was missing, 32% in balls and screaming.
But there is no other option and we must surrender to them in the most difficult circumstances and, on top of that, they are always supposed to do good – which makes any power even more powerful, almost unassailable.
And in Spain whoever practices it, be it a man or a woman, is always a doctor.
The Iberian academies and dictionaries incorporated the word "doctor" more than a century ago, but there is no case: here they say lawyer, architect, queen, deputy, thief, biologist or nun, but not doctor.
It always surprised me, and today I have a very provisional hypothesis: that doctor is —along with a judge— a title that does not admit women because it is the profession where power matters most, where it is best imposed —and power, in our societies, is continues to conjugate in the masculine.
Do you think, or is it that I am irremediably becoming feminazi?
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