I once took a job in the tropics, and my employer sent me for a medical examination to check that I was fit for hardship. My medical was just like the one that Marlowe underwent in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, before he went out to the Belgian Congo.
Marlowe was in Brussels for his medical—a city, he says, that “always makes me think of a whited sepulchre.” And then he adds, “Prejudice no doubt.” I confess to a similar prejudice. Brussels shows us our glorious future: bureaucracy and sex shows.
Marlowe is told that the medical is a simple formality, just as I was told it was. And so, indeed, it proves and proved.
Marlowe's doctor—an old one, just as mine was—examines him in a perfunctory manner, just as I was examined. “The old doctor felt my pulse, evidently thinking of something else the while.” Quite so: the old doctor in my case passed his stethoscope swiftly over my chest, the bell hovering just above the surface and never alighting anywhere. He would have heard anything only if I had had a tape recorder inside playing at full volume. It was more propitiation than science, and he muttered to himself throughout.
“Good, good for out there,” mumbled the doctor to Marlowe, and my doctor mumbled something similar. I told him that I took thyroxine daily, and he asked me how many grains. Even in those days grains had not been used as units of measurement for quite a number of years.
“Ever any madness in your family?” the doctor asks Marlowe. I was asked the same question, slightly less than a century later. It depends on what you call madness, I thought. And just like Marlowe I wondered what the point of the question was.
The ceremony nearly over, the doctor dispenses advice to Marlowe: “Avoid irritation more than exposure to the sun . . . In the tropics one must before everything keep calm.” Of course, in those days the rays of the tropical sun were thought to be dangerous, if not fatal, to white people; even 30 years later Dr Schweitzer recounts in one of his books the case of a man driven stark mad by a single ray of sunshine that fell on his negligently unprotected neck. The injunction to keep calm at all costs was therefore a very serious one.
My doctor advised that I should be careful of the water and not drink too much alcohol. Insects, he said, were to be avoided. I didn't altogether succeed in following his advice: I got malaria, jiggers, and myiasis.
As Marlowe leaves the consulting room the doctor says, with an admonitory wag of the finger, “Du calme, du calme. Adieu.” This reminds me of another time I departed for an exotic destination: India. I was a student, and my trip meant that I would return late to medical school. I went to the dean to ask his permission to do so.
“India,” he said. “Ah …” He looked in the far distance, far beyond the walls of his office, extracting a rare insight from a point at infinity. “A land of people—and animals.”
He gave me his permission, even his blessing; and at the door, as I left him, he repeated, “Remember: people—and animals.”
I've never forgotten it. But what exactly did he mean? The same question has, of course, been asked of Conrad.
The medical was just like the one Marlowe underwent in Heart of Darkness