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THE INADEQUACY OF TREATMENT

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by Trevor Abes

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The Montreal Review, September 2010

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So there's this guy named Charles Leale, who's dead but is in many respects still here. He was the first doctor to touch Lincoln after he was shot. The story goes that Leale placed his finger on Lincoln's bullet wound at one point, for just a few seconds, causing the pressure in the top-hat partial president's head to rise. Not a smart move; not an entirely stupid one either due to the medical profession's dependence on trial and error for progress. Despite the fact that Leale is somewhat responsible for Lincoln's death, if historical documentation proves factual, all he did was act upon a base human trigger we're all guilty of acceding to, i.e. filling in holes as best we can.

Emptiness is a liability as far as most of us are concerned, the do-right go-to option being the insertion of content, whether amateurish or painstakingly honed. The filler could be a set of words, riddled with likes and as ifs, or with clever allusions and breathtaking turns of phrase. It could be an empty picture frame on a coffee table, a hand in another, and even, yes, a cock. What is it then that makes us cringe at the barren, the void, or more generally, at nothing? I do not know; that's why I'm writing about it I suppose, which partially answers the question.

A good place to start is where cheesiness resides, in the tried and withered refrains we recur to time and time again. Take that Colin Ferrell movie, Telephone: A great, underrated film in many respects that centres on the question of why it is that a ringing phone must always be answered. Maybe it's because it's interrupting the silence we were in before it started ringing, but then again the phone will most likely stop ringing and go dead on the other end if we let it be. It seems that there's a deeper issue at work here. Next example: Charity infomercials. Any sane, self-respecting person would agree that charities that offer aid to, say, starving children in Uganda, are good things. Said person would also most likely agree that said charities should utilize the powers of television to get their shared message across. Yet, unless you're somehow compelled to get your hands dirty by actually going to Africa to help with the cause you're probably going to change the channel as soon as you spot a bloated child ignoring the flies on his or her face. In all these cases, the cringe causing emptiness is personal, located deep down inside of you, and you offset it by holding a view that reads: There should be more infomercials like this on more often. Such a view is the unnecessary content of your void, topped up rather than explored, clogged as opposed to re-structured. What this whole one-way conversation points to, in my head at least, is to an attitude that is excessively prevalent nowadays: Our obliviousness to the reasons why we do something, contrasted with our admirable expertise concerning the thing done, which brings us back in a hopefully illustrative circle to our aforementioned aversion for nothing.

Why did Charles Leale place his finger on the hole in Lincoln's head? Well, because he thought it lacked something, and without knowing what exactly was missing, he filled it with the best thing he could find. Therefore, I do not blame him for the consequences of what he did. It's thanks to him that we now know what to do in similar situations, or rather what not to do.

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