Years ago, I was vacationing in Maine, on Kezar Lake, and got invited by some locals to play in a softball game. It quickly became apparent all the other players had been born in raised in this small town by the lake, the plumber, the electrician, a general store owner. They had grown up together playing softball and ice hockey and they knew each other in that way only people who have know each other their whole lives can.
For me, this was a visit to another part of the solar system. Where I grew up, in a suburb of Washington, DC, children knew from age eight they were destined to leave, and likely never to return. We would grow up knowing the kids in our neighborhood, our schools until we were 18 and then we were expected to leave town and go off to college, and likely we'd go to grad school or professional school and get jobs in parts of the country. It was the Bethesda diaspora. You grew up and part of that was you moved on.
For my wife, an Army brat, this sort of periodic dislocation was also an accepted part of life, but the difference there was as a military family, you kept running across people you'd known earlier at different posts, someone from elementary school who winds up in your high school after a five year absence. And once you got accustomed to the idea, you sort of liked it--you got to reinvent yourself every three years, when your father got a new posting in Germany or Hawaii or somewhere.
But now I'm looking at the last tuition payment, and thinking, what will the trajectory of this son's life be like?
Which brings me to Doc Martin. The main character in this wonderful series goes off to London, where he becomes a vascular surgeon, functioning atop the very stratified British medical profession, where, as his edgy old flame, an academic gynecologist says, "the big boys play." Martin Ellingham, MD then gives up his post and moves back to become a general practitioner in the small Cornwall town by the sea where he had sought refuge as a child with a beloved aunt, on her farm, and now he will be the town doctor. In the British system this is roughly the equivalent of an American doctor who leaves Mass General to become a nurse practitioner in a small town.
"ER" was a good fiction for college students, pre meds, medical students in their first years of medical school, but Doc Martin is literature for doctors who have been in practice for a few decades, done some primary care, been at the university Meccas, and then got out into the real world. It has characters who keep surprising you and plotlines which never quite work out as you expect. It serves one of the highest functions of literature: it allows you to see your own life from a different perspective and it forces you to ask questions about your own choices in life, the places where you get your own satisfactions. It is a very intelligent work of art.
It is not The Wire, but in some senses, it is even darker, because the sadness derives not from dysfunctional systems or malignant institutions, for which there is always some implied remedy. The darkness here comes from the depths of the characters we watch. Doc Martin is a deeply injured, often unlikeable fellow. He is inexplicably cruel to his wonderful secretary, writing her a letter of reference saying only that she was "competent" when in fact she has been keeping his practice running, filling in all the gaps of kindness and caring he has omitted. He cannot allow a moment of tenderness to occur, telling Louisa, who leans in for a kiss, she has bad breath and when she later pulls him off the path to embrace him he says she smells of pherhormones which are derived from urine.
His major attraction, for Louisa, is his astonishing competence. He saves people right in front of her, with daring procedures, despite a nearly incapacitating disability.
I'm reading Dickens now, and it is striking how consistently Dickens writes about the depredations visited upon children. Oliver Twist, Great Expectation, David Copperfield, all about corrupt adult institutions and families damaging young, vulnerable children. That's what happened to Doctor Martin Ellingham as a child, the son of a self absorbed, vile mother and an uninterested father, who was too busy chasing younger women to care much about his foundering son.
But there is something fascinating about a man who is socially awkward, personally brutal and obnoxious, who, nevertheless is driven by a sense of doing something which is important, for whom work gives life meaning the way nothing else, not relationships with people, not money, ever could.
Frederick Banting, shown above, with his young colleague, was such a real life man. He discovered insulin and save the lives of millions, an achievement beyond which, unfortunately, modern medicine has not moved much.
Sometimes, the world needs people like Doc Martin, or Frederick Banting. No other type will do.
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