How Am I, Doctor?

At 8:15 every Friday morning, some ten million Britons tune in BBC for five minutes of painless medicine. The rich, soothing voice that pours out of the radio sounds like a ham actor's impersonation of a family doctor. Britain's "Radio Doctor" dispenses no-nonsense counsel that seldom fails to cheer his listeners.

The doctor makes a point of not coddling his vast, loyal audience. "Doctor, does it do any good in rheumatism to carry a potato in the pocket?" asked a listener last week. "A fatheaded question," replied the amiable doctor. "Now I ask you--do you really think that changes in the joints, deep-seated changes, can be effected by a spud in your jacket pocket?"

Technically (because of organized medicine's starchy and persnickety "ethics"), the "Radio Doctor" is anonymous; but many a BBC listener knows by now that he is 43-year-old Dr. Charles Hill, fat, shrewd secretary of the British Medical Association. Dr. Hill has long been B.M.A.'s chief spokesman and propagandist. Primarily a health educator, he had practiced little bedside medicine before he went on the air. But in the last six years he has become one of Britain's most powerful and popular medicos.

The doctor's health talks are an adroit mixture of sharply worded advice and blunt humor. "Life," he explains to his ten million listeners, "is a matter of moments that are lost and bowels that are distended." His descriptions of ailments are calculated to shock hypochondriacs out of their introspective gloom ("Just think of a boil--as round as a football, as red as a raspberry, as tender as the treacly smile of a lovesick maiden!").

Other Hillisms:

P: "The road to intestinal purgatory is paved with purgatives. . . . The bowel becomes dazed and dull. . . ."

P: "If you take alcohol, don't pretend you're doing a virtuous thing, that it's good food or medicine. It isn't. It's a drug."

P: "Breast milk is the best food, bar none. It's easier, cheaper than anything else; no rationing, no milkman to bring it, already pasteurized, served up piping hot, and ready for immediate consumption."

P: "The only preventive [for baldness] . . . is to avoid being born to parents with a streak of baldness. It's probably something to do with the sex glands. Nobody has ever seen a bald eunuch."

P: "Vaccines are no use . . . they are not worth the trouble. . . . Vitamins don't prevent colds or cure them. There's a bit of a racket there. ... If you take no drugs, your cold lasts 14 days; if you take drugs, it lasts a fortnight."

P: "Eat something green and raw every day."

P: "Don't be like the old lady who, put on a diet, was discovered by her doctor eating a steak-&-kidney pudding. 'Yes, doctor,' she said, 'I've 'ad me diet; now I'm 'aving me dinner.'"

In spite of such showmanship, the Radio Doctor enjoys high standing in his profession; a B.M.A. colleague admits that no physician in the country has done more for preventive medicine than Dr. Hill and his avuncular broadcasts. Dr. Hill himself has a simple explanation for his huge popularity: his talks are based on the solid truism that people are more interested in disease than in health. Says he: "If I want to discuss the circulation, I start by mentioning varicose veins. I know then that I'll have the sympathetic ear of most."

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