Preacher, Doctor

We're still catching up with old episodes of Deadwood on the History Channel, and I have yet again been struck by the power of some of the issues.

In this first series, the preacher has been getting progressively more ill. I diagnosed a brain tumour, shortly afterwards, the doctor made the same diagnosis. I would like to think that this is because I have a secret calling as a Physician, however it seems more likely that the series simply has good writers.

In my last but one school, I had a colleague who was diagnosed with a brain tumour - not by me I should add, but by a proper, qualified doctor. She left the staff room one Friday evening to consult her doctor about the headaches she had been having, she had not normally been a sufferer of headaches, and she never returned.

The colleague was an absolutely incredible woman, a real Christian in the most genuine definition of the word, and a member of the communist party. Another colleague, a close friend of hers visited her in hospital to the end of her life, and although for most of the illness, in spite of the shock, and the pain, she had maintained a genuine interest in the progress of the illness and her own response to it, towards the end, even with every painkilling drug that modern pharmacology has to offer, she wanted it to end.

So I have watched the preacher in Deadwood deteriorate and suffer without most of those drugs. Oh yes, I know that Laudanum and other opiates were available, (and yes I do get that this was an actor playing a part so I shouldn't be too alarmed) but the depth of suffering for someone in that situation in those days must have been horrific.

These two characters, the doctor and the preacher were locked into this endgame together, the ever more bizarre religious fervour of the preacher and the mounting anger and frustration of the doctor. In this lawless town, where a community survives and struggles on rough justice and the law of the jungle, these two people kept ties with civilisation, the preacher was needed to give comfort to those dying of smallpox and to bury them and others killed by the hand of the villainous elements of the town, for decency. The doctor was the only hope for most of the townsfolk.

And finally, the doctor can do no more, he deposits his patient with the town's brothel-keeper and de facto leader who turns out one of his whores to give the preacher a room. While the doctor, on his knees and entreating God to end this poor man's suffering, railing at God for allowing the preacher to continue in his intense pain, the evil scum of Deadwood, pimp, murderer, abuser, fornicator, liar, cheat, swindler, blasphemer, takes the damp cloth with which he has been tending to the preacher's fever, holds it over the preacher's mouth and does what the God-fearing may not do, he suffocates him, ends his misery, with respect.

Powerful, powerful stuff. Who could be the judge of that?