During my childhood, adolescence and teenage years, and well into my twenties and thirties, our family doctor was the all-encompassing purveyor of all our illnesses and medical conditions and, mind you, all he was armed with was the humble stethoscope, from which he could hear the various sounds of the body organs by merely probing the various areas of the body. His diagnosis of any disease was arrived at by deftly using the stethoscope, seeing the colour of the eyes and examining the tongue, a precise diagnosis that now, in modern times, requires elaborate blood tests costing thousands of rupees, X-rays, sonography, electrocardiograms, electroencephalograms, and various other elaborate tests using sophisticated testing equipment that sometimes confuses and misleads doctors while determining especially difficult-to-diagnose co-morbidities in medical conditions. The sensitive diaphragm of the stethoscope revealed every ailment.
The norm was that doctors, who had a lesser number of choices of medicines but would also be dealing with diseases like cholera, dysentery, typhoid, chickenpox, smallpox, various types of flu and even rare cases of diabetes, would target prescriptions that were very effective and cured your illness in a short duration.
Nowadays, despite the complexity of testing equipment, a doctor is not sometimes in a position to determine the medical condition with precision. I would ascribe this to doctors during my early years, who, armed with only the stethoscope, had very sharp senses that enabled them to detect conditions accurately with only one simple stethoscope and their incisive minds. In other words, a doctor then would only use a combination of abilities, sharp intuition and raw faculties in order to cure any ailment after a precise diagnosis. At that time, even pathologists were a very rare breed. Thumbs up to our doctors of yesteryears for their sharp intellect and incisive senses without the luxury of elaborate tests. They were also relatively inexpensive.
Stephen Dias, Dona Paula
