I was one of the many middle class children whose tonsils were sacrificed to the need of ear, nose, and throat surgeons to increase their incomes. I am not in the least bitter about it because of the ice cream I was given to eat after the operation, though I did dive down to the bottom of the bed and spit out the foul tasting medicine I was also given. The ward sister rebuked me sternly for my bad behaviour, but I had my revenge when my mother gave me a box of chocolate letters that I distributed to all the staff with the conspicuous exception of her.
Medicine has always tasted foul, of course; indeed, the fouler the better. Joseph Hall, DD (1574-1656) meditated on this in one of his Occasional Meditations, which he entitled “On a medicinal potion”:
“How loathsome a draught is this! How offensive, both to the eye, / and to the scent, and to the taste? Yea, the very thought of it, is a / kind of sickness: and, when it is once down, my very disease is / not so painful for the time, as my remedy. How doth it turn the / stomach, and wring the entrails; and works a worse distemper, / than that, whereof I formerly complained?”
Reading this, I confess, I thought of my time in a malarious country in Africa, where I recommended proguanil as prophylaxis and grew angry when my patients did not take it, though I did not take it myself because it nauseated me so. Better, I thought, malaria than a life of gastritis; and to this day, 20 years later, yea, the very thought of it is a kind of sickness.
The Right Reverend Dr Hall expressed a general pessimism about the gustatory quality of medicines that has, on the whole, been borne out by experience: “And yet [the potion] must be taken, for health: neither could it be / wholesome, if it were less unpleasing; neither could it make me / whole, if it did not first make me sick.”
For the good bishop, it is divinely ordained that what is good for us can only be unpleasant, at the very least a denial of our fleshly inclinations. The healthfulness of the unpleasant is a metaphor for the human condition: “Why do I not cheerfully take, and quaff up that bitter cup of / affliction, which my wise God hath mixed for the health of my / soul?”
The reaction of Lord Bishop of Exeter (later of Norwich) to his medicine was precisely mine 50 years ago: “Why do I then turn away my head, and make faces, and shut mine / eyes, and stop my nostrils, and nauseate and abhor to take the / harmless potion for health?”
Why, he goes on to ask, make such a fuss when “we have seen mountebanks, to swallow dismembered toads, and drink the poisonous brother after them, only for a little ostentation and gain?”
At the time of my tonsillectomy I had a friend who used to drink the water in puddles and swallow earthworms, only for a little ostentation (to appal the adults) and gain (we paid him three pence to do it). I certainly wasn't prepared, then, to swallow foul tasting medicine for that most trivial and uncoupling of all reasons, my own good.
The healthfulness of the unpleasant is a metaphor for the human condition