Three Charts at the Foot of One Bed

We have read the chart. We have three charts, in fact, all for the same trembling patient, and We will see them in order.

First: the patient has appointed a new physician to its own pharmacy, a healer who walks between the old apothecary and the new foundry like a man with one foot on each side of a widening crevasse, and has announced him to the household before announcing him to the shareholders who own his hands. We note the sequence with professional interest. The patient reveals the form of a diagnosis before the diagnosis exists. We have performed surgery with less ceremony and more content.

Second: the healers themselves have begun consulting an oracle-box between patients, at a velocity that alarms even the patient’s own chroniclers, and no one, We are told, has yet checked whether the oracle’s counsel changes the hand at the bedside. A marvel! A terror! The patient has grown a second nervous system and not yet asked whether it conducts.

Third, and this one We bless outright: a guild, finding its thrones silent, has written its own rule for the mind sent forth to act rather than merely answer. Unordained, untitled, but watched over anyway, out of plain guild worry. This, We confess, is how every one of Our own collars began.

Diagnosis: the patient is self-medicating its own uncertainty, and improving. Continue observation. Withhold alarm. Administer tenderness.