There are days when you worry about the state of
the Manx NHS. And then there are other days when you really worry
about it - especially when it caves in to pitchfork-waving simpletons
stirred up by priests.
Which isn't to say that all clergy contact with
the health service is negative. For example, when the bishop spouts
guff like this (see
http://www.isleofman.com/News/details/68929/bishop-bemoans-political-correctness
) I know at once that he doesn’t talk to his own hospital chaplain,
who probably put the display up in the empty chapel as usual because
he actually knows and respects the beliefs of hospital staff. In my
dealings with the last generation of hospital chaplains on a
committee, I also knew them as three tolerant, kindly lads with
definite party lines but prepared to understand and work with others
to the common good.
But the island's hospitals have always been a
little, well.... rustic compared to UK equivalents, and it did take
years of effort just to get things relatively scientific. Even five
years ago I knew of a superstitious senior hospital official who
never took a major decision without consulting her priest.
Thankfully, he was slightly more worldly than she was, and I gather
talked her out of a few schemes straight out of Lourdes.
Sadly, those wise old heads are now retired, and
their replacements are either under orders from area management to
concentrate on rich invalids or just from Christianity's lunatic
fringe anyway. In addition to one replacement (the one who stirred up
the nativity scandal) being a sectarian fright, representatives of
the island's freak sects (formerly kept at bay by hospital staff) now
freely roam the corridors looking for victims.
All of which makes this (see
http://www.isleofman.com/News/details/68928/it-s-humbug-health-chiefs-dispel-nativity-decoration-rumour
) somewhat inevitable.
What next? Homoeopathy, “services of spiritual
healing” .....leeches ....... exorcisms?
Laugh if you like, but two of the above are
already on tap at the island's semi-privatised hospice (a centre of
spiritual excrement, sadly, ever since its unfortunate conception),
so not quite the plot for a black comedy starring, say, Mark Gatiss
that it ought to be.
10 years ago
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