(Fox’s hit show House is explicitly modeled-right down to its punning title-on Sherlock Holmes.) But there’s also something deeper. They’re like detectives working the most fascinating crime beat of all: how our bodies are trying to murder us. As with lawyers and cops (the other deep ruts cutting through our TV landscape), the doctor’s most basic professional transaction is a perfect story arc: crisis, attempted solution, result. Part of the appeal is simple convenience. We still spend GNPs every year erecting pop-cultural monuments to their fictional surgeries and love affairs and brilliant deductions and ethical struggles. My invented cancer was only a mirror image of the Clooney superfan’s tousled Caesar cut: an unfortunate homage to the powerful mythology of doctors. I like to think that this irrational terror was not, in fact, unique to me but just a micro-expression of our culture’s bizarre fetish for doctors. (In the end I survived my cancer, heroically, when it turned out to be the world’s most benign mole.) In a tragic irony, my doctorphobia seemed to coincide with a spike in America’s doctorphilia: ER was drawing Super Bowl–scale audiences, metastasizing copycat shows, and introducing the word stat! into casual conversation. (Also, occasionally they wrote prescriptions.) The possibility of their disapproval struck me as worse, somehow, than the possibility of actual death. In my imagination, doctors formed a telepathically connected global fraternity that could smell fear-like a superrich, omnipotent swarm of bees-and that lived exclusively to shame anyone who dared resist its awesome power.
I spent most of my youth and early adulthood avoiding doctors because I thought I was being eaten alive by a secret mysterious cancer, and I was pretty sure that once it was discovered, physicians everywhere would be mad at me.
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