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A TASTE for apples may have had the unfortunate consequence of getting
Adam and Eve turfed out of the Garden of Eden, but if it is really true
that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, then I reckon that mankind’s
loss of the tenancy of a dubious pleasure ground and safari park (after
all, who wants to live in a pleasure ground full of subversive snakes, for
Heaven’s sake?) was a small price to pay for an introduction to the delights
and virtues of a truly valuable fruit.

I even suspect that the serpent (who, we are assured, ‘was more subtile
than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made’) may have had the
apple’s prophylactic effect against intrusions upon the consumer’s privacy
by members of the medical profession in mind when he urged the young Eve
to sample a golden delicious (or whatever variety of the genus Malus the
Lord God had chosen to help start greengrocers off in business), and that
all this nonsense about a ‘tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ is just
so much myth and fable, of a kind so freely invented by historians stuck
for a credible explanation of past events, which is what they are supposed
to be good at doing.

It can, of course, be argued that doctors hadn’t been invented at the
time of Man’s shameful fall, but I bet it wasn’t long before the first of
the breed emerged, with some clever, quite close descendant of Adam and
Eve realising that he could avoid all the toil and tribulation of scratching
a living from the soil by the sweat of his face, and could, instead, do
very nicely indeed, thank you, by simply pretending to offer relief from
the ills which the flesh is heir to by making incantations and packaging
up and dispensing the odd herbal remedy. Far easier to do this for a fee
of a peck of corn than actually growing the stuff yourself, dammit.

The serpent would have foreseen such a happening – not difficult for
the most ‘subtile’ of beasts who could apparently converse fluently with
a slightly simple-minded member of an alien species long before the first
‘Learn a Foreign Language in Just Three Weeks’ tapes came on the scene.

If I am right, and if the serpent was, indeed, a compassionate fellow,
offering Eve and her mate and their seed forever a powerful charm against
the predations of physicians, then I think it damned unfair that a petulant
Lord should have told the poor chap that ‘Because thou hast done this, thou
art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy
belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life’.

But then the all-powerful, or the apparently all-powerful, have always
overreacted to any hints of insubordination or opposition. Perhaps because,
being all-powerful, they sense that they are probably damned unpopular with
the hoi polloi, and so not secure in their power at all, and don’t want
to take any chances. It’s a wonder that the Lord God didn’t stamp the serpent
out of existence on the spot instead of just condemning the creature to
belly-crawling and dust-chumping for all eternity. But maybe God’s a bit
of a sadist and likes to see His less favoured creatures suffer, which they
wouldn’t do if they were dead.

Another possible reason for the Lord God’s exaggerated response to the
serpent’s peccadillo is that He, God, is solidly on the side of the physicians.
I haven’t any direct evidence for this presumption, never having spoken
to the man, but I have spoken to lots and lots of physicians during the
course of a long lifetime in the medical trade, and I can assure you, dear
reader, that most of them are confident that they are privileged agents
of the Lord.

All this philosophical meandering is inspired by an expensively produced
brochure recently delivered to my home (at my expense, via the taxes on
income and petrol and claret and other staves of life) in which our government
tells me that my friendly neighbourhood GP will be given money to subject
me to ‘regular ‘life-style’ check-ups’, and suggesting that he will approach
me, to discover how I’m manag ing in this vale of tears, if I haven’t seen
him for some time.

Well, if I haven’t seen him for some time (and I haven’t) it’s because
I haven’t felt the need, but I’ll guarantee that anybody subjecting my ancient
frame to all the clever tests on hand could readily discover a range of
faults that ought to be ‘corrected’. And I’ll also guarantee that the remedies
prescribed would be likely to do me rather more harm than good.

A GP friend of mine, who has achieved a reputation for his success in
reducing his prescribing to something like 30 per cent of the national average,
has coined an epigram. ‘Patients imagine they’re ill, GPs confirm that they’re
ill, and hospitals keep them ill.’

That might be a little bit over the top, but I do suggest that our present
administration is acting stupidly in attempting to force medical attention
down our throats.

It won’t do us any good. Follow the serpent’s advice. Eat an apple a
day.