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.
