The Orphan Bridge
Near my house there is a bridge sitting in a middle of a field. A footpath roughly crosses the field but there is no other sign of why a stone bridge sits there. It may as well have been dropped from the sky. I think of it as an orphan bridge. Years ago the canal came this way but you will have to walk along the path for a mile or two to find the canal. There is no remnant of the old path, probably a cart track, that went over the bridge.
One of the books I have just read is The Biography of a Germ by Arno Karlen. It is a slim volume and it only takes an evening or two to get through but it is worth savouring. As it charts the life of borrelia burgdorferi it mentions in passing temporal provinciality. This is the inability to recognise that we live in a changing world. We all have the illusion of stasis. We look at mountains and they look utterly permanent, immutable. Of course, in our feeble human spans they are effectively just that but we all know that they change over scarcely conceiveable timescales. It is remarkable feature of the human brain that we can even contemplate this. Unless you are a geologist, paelontologist or an evolutionary biologist there is no requirement to think outside of our own temporal prison in daily life.
Examples of temporal provincialism are everywhere and medicine is no exception.
Why is it so difficult to persuade some people of the seriousness of measles as a disease? Probably because measles is joining a list of diseases that are outside of our time frame. GPs don’t get their flu vaccine – perhaps it is related to the fact the last real epidemic lies outside living memory. Patients turn up and ask for antibiotics for viral illnesses. We have to resist; to consider a future (like the very recent past, already forgotten) without antibiotics and the need to nurture this precious resource. People still smoke – temporal provinciality and the inability to imagine their own aging and diseased bodies? A future without general practice is worringly close enough to be just about visible on our temporal horizons. The list goes on.
Of course, I can congratulate myself and recognise that temporal provinciality drives so much of my activity. And especially my inactivity – for instance, think how much difficulty there is with global warming and temporal provinciality. We probably won’t really act until it enters our temporal frames.
But there is no other time in which I can live and if I was one of those boatmen that had ghosted under my orphan bridge could I have imagined it as it is today? Not in my wildest dreams.
