From the Editors: To fully understand this essay, it's necessary to be familiar with the old rhyme, "I do not like thee, Doctor Fell," and the story behind it, which Chesterton and his readers would have been familiar with.
The story of this poem goes that in 1680, Tom Brown, a student at Christ Church, Oxford, was caught making trouble, and the dean, John Fell, was going to expel him unless Tom could translate a latin poem on the spot. Tom translated it perfectly, but, perhaps in spite, changed the one name in the poem, Sibidius, to the name of the dean, Doctor Fell:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why – I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
In his 1920 essay titled The Doctor and the Doctrinaire, Chesterton mused about writing for the world a dramatic novel of an unlikeable, autocratic doctor named Dr. Fell (an allusion to the well-known rhyme above). Among other descriptions of this hypothetical story, he described Dr. Fell's just demise, although noting that his demise would be "at best a prophecy; for it would represent something which, I regret to say, has not happened yet." One hundred years and a global pandemic later, the world has reason to ask - will there be a just demise to despotic healthcare in our lifetime?
In The Roots of the World, Duncan Reyburn’s philosophical analysis of G. K. Chesterton’s genius for prophetic speech, the South African scholar lists, among many fulfilled prophecies, Chesterton’s prediction of a repressive regime based in healthcare. It was seen “in many actions taken by governments and organizations around the globe during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.”
The watchwords during this recent time of prophetic fulfillment were encapsulated in a variety of slogans designed to put down ordinary people who objected to the arbitrary, illogical, and often destructive demands made of them in the name of medical “safety.” People from around the world were told, “Trust the science!”
Yet, when they actually did some digging, ordinary people discovered that the actual science bore little relation to the game of “Doctor Simon Says” that was being played. Masks, plexiglass barriers, markings in the grocery store indicating which direction one could safely walk, and eventually vaccines that were demanded but didn’t render any immunity to the virus were all shouted by the leaders of the game, often with the very real threats of social, legal, and financial penalties behind them.
To bring up data, statistics, or even peer-reviewed studies about any of the supposedly scientific diktats was to provoke the angry retort that “doing your own research” was not allowed because “You’re not an epidemiologist!”
If you didn’t wear the mask, you wouldn’t be allowed into the business or even the church building. If you attended a Thanksgiving dinner at your neighbor’s house, you might just receive a visit from the police if you lived in states such as Minnesota, where Governor Tim Walz established a snitch line to report violators of the protocols. Gatherings with family and friends, like gatherings to worship at churches, were treated as life-threatening superspreader events. And many who were not opposed to letting others receive a vaccine that had been rushed into existence, but did not want to take it for themselves for a variety of reasons, lost jobs or benefits for exercising “an abundance of caution” in a way not approved by the medical and governmental tyrants who were making up the rules as they went, with little care for the truth.
To bring up data, statistics, or even peer-reviewed studies about any of the supposedly scientific diktats was to provoke the angry retort that “doing your own research” was not allowed because “You’re not an epidemiologist!” Even to link Scientific Wrongthink on social media platforms was to risk having one’s posts taken down or hidden—or even being kicked off the platforms.
Though they liked to say we should “trust the science,” our betters were really demanding that we submit to the scientists who had exchanged the latex glove for an iron fist.
How, you might ask, could Chesterton have predicted such a regime? Well, as Reyburn’s book argues, the gift of prophecy does not merely consist in predictions of future events. It consists in seeing the present and understanding the powerful causes of things. Chesterton saw the way in which doctors were already becoming troublesome and dictatorial villains in his own day.
“The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government,” he wrote in Eugenics and Other Evils, “is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science.”
This is why so many of his stories, such as his novel The Ball and the Cross, feature medical villains. “I do not suppose that Chesterton entertained any special animosity against doctors generally,” explained Russell Kirk in his essay “Chesterton, Madmen, and Madhouses.” Instead, Kirk explained, “the mad-doctors of his parables stand for defecated intellectuality in our time—for the cult of Rationalism leagued with the selfish and domineering appetites of men emancipated from old obligations and loyalties.”
Kirk’s explanation is accurate. Chesterton explained it in his usual imaginative way in a 1923 Vanity Fair essay titled “The Doctor and the Doctrinaire.” In the essay, Chesterton began with a kind of wish. “If I could give to the world a great psychological masterpiece,” he wrote, “I should throw it into the form of a drama or novel with the title of Dr. Fell.”
Chesterton’s violent fantasia is in the same vein as his much-repeated complaint, “It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.”
The hypothetical masterpiece, he explained, would describe “how that medical man, in spite of his medical degree and distinction (and the finished bedside manner which I feel sure he possessed) yet managed to miss a complete popularity, and that in a manner that has become a proverb.” By missing a complete popularity, Chesterton goes on to detail, Dr. Fell’s fate would not be what Henry David Thoreau said was that of the mass of men: “lives of quiet desperation.” Rather, the story would include the account of how “various kinds of people, covering all classes of society,” ended their lives without an ability “to die in charity with their medical adviser.” The last of these “quieter scenes” would depict a poet whose dying curse takes the form of “an immortal rhyme” (Chesterton's crafty reference to the rhyme, I do not like thee, Doctor Fell).
Yet the final and much louder scene imagined by Chesterton does make the reader see why Kirk might bring up the possibility that Chesterton might harbor some special animosity toward medical doctors. The climactic ending would be one “in which Dr. Fell is torn in pieces by a raging mob, to the doctor’s repeated and lucid question as to why they do not like him….”
He realized that the doctors invoking “science” were really invoking what we now call “scientism,” that curiously philosophical and unscientific belief that natural science alone provides us with all possible knowledge worth having.
In the midst of such a bloody finale, Chesterton wanted the author to “let himself go” quite a bit more by way of moving beyond “light psychology” into the realm of “human and divine justice,” thus offering a prophecy of something he regretted had not happened yet. Again, however, it is not medicine per se that rouses Chesterton’s ire. Chesterton’s violent fantasia is in the same vein as his much-repeated complaint, “It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.” The hatred is not for the profession, but for the growingly authoritarian claim to power in the name of health.
For Dr. Fell is now a highly prosperous practitioner. He has not only a professional but a political status. The State of modern times has given him more power than was ever given to the priest. In some places he has been able to dry up all the drinks of historic humanity by pronouncing an Arabic word as a sort of charm or spell; the word “alcohol.” In other places he is allowed to interfere with ordinary love-making: and to walk up to a wedding party which does not take his fancy, and stop the wedding. He calls it, I believe, eugenics. In England he has been attached as a panel doctor to the poor under a compulsory scheme of insurance. In other words, the poor people do not like him (for such is his mystic destiny); but they are obliged to have him whether they like him or not.
Dr. Fell might have been a fictional representation of the doctors claiming total control over a society. Dr. Fauci is not. What joins them is the use of incantations invoking “science” to grasp power over ordinary lives—for our own good, of course.
Of course. Right?
Chesterton certainly didn’t believe so. He realized that the doctors invoking “science” were really invoking what we now call “scientism,” that curiously philosophical and unscientific belief that natural science alone provides us with all possible knowledge worth having. He knew as do most of us that natural science can tell us about how things in the material world work. It cannot tell us what they mean or what we ought to do. That is why, in an essay in All Things Considered, he observed that “we are accused of attacking science because we want it to be scientific.”
That mixing of philosophy and science destroyed much trust in medicine.
It is the doctor’s “affair to say that certain results of health will follow if we do go to a watering-place.” It is certainly not his affair to say whether we should go. Insofar as he is a doctor, his authority is purely in explaining the likely medical effects of a behavior based on his understanding of actual science. “Physical science is like simple addition,” Chesterton explains; “it is either infallible or it is false.” Chesterton’s critique of the doctors claiming political power is that they have created “a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a science that has lost all its practical value.”
This was what happened in the Covid-19 episode. Many doctors, sensing that they had achieved a degree of political power, began to give commands from the mountain in the name of physical science that were either based on false scientific analysis or—worse!—political philosophy in which they had no authoritative role or expertise. This is how so many came up with the absurd claims that church gatherings were dangerous but mass protests on behalf of Black Lives Matter were both sanitary and salutary. That mixing of philosophy and science destroyed much trust in medicine.
It is good that it did. We need not tear Dr. Fauci limb from limb. We do need skepticism and refusal of submission to him and others whose cries of “science” are merely masks for selfish and domineering appetites for control.
From the Editors: Want more? Read Chesterton's The Doctor and the Doctrinaire here: https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1920/9/the-doctor-and-the-doctrinaire
