Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment by A.J. Lees (review)

"In his welcome address," Andrew Lees writes of the beginning of his medical studies at London Hospital Medical College in October of 1965, "the Dean informed us that we were here to study medicine and that from now on our lives would be dedicated to the prevention, cure or alleviation of human disease. Medicine," the Dean stressed, "was a calling, not a business" (10). There but for the grace of Fate go I was the Dean's message. Indeed, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto – I am human, nothing human is foreign to me – was the teaching hospital's motto. But almost overnight Lees witnessed in many of his fellow medical students an extremely disturbing and worrisome transformation as they became a-lien- ated – the link between doctors and patients, between self and other, was broken – as if patients were them, mere subhuman collections of body parts, carriers of disease, and mundane opportunities for uppercase "D" Doctors to demonstrate their brilliance and celebrate their superiority. Although Lees says that Wolynski, the man whose body he and his fellow anatomy lab partners dissected, helped him "to acquire the carapace of insensitivity required to become a doctor" (12), the self-protective "carapace" Lees acquired was not the gross dehumanizing insensitivity he found so painful in the "self- satisfied and narrow-minded" (16) attitude and behaviour developing in many of his fellow students and the often frank sadism of some of his superiors.

It was in this context of patient suffering and medical insensitivity, prejudice, and condescension that Lees experienced two kairotic, intensely formative moments. The first was a poignant and inspiring encounter with a patient during Lees's first house physician appointment at what is now the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. This patient suffered – I use the word advisedly – from Parkinson's disease and was confined to a wheelchair and completely dependent on his family to be fed, dressed, and bathed. This former worker from the London Underground viewed Parkinson's as a death sentence and was pinning all his hopes on the new miracle drug L-DOPA, which he had read about in the newspapers. The results Lees's patient obtained literally within days "turned [Lees] into a 'Molecule Man' overnight" (27) and convinced him that "further peptide and amine research would lead to cures for Alzheimer's disease and all the other brutal brain degenerations within five years" (27). No such overnight progress was made but that didn't slow Lees down in the least.

The second crucial experience, which ultimately gave hope to the first, was Lees's discovery of an unknown face on the front album cover of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. "Amidst the rows of famous faces he was on the second row next to Marilyn Monroe and above Oscar Wilde. I didn't recognise him so I looked him up" (17).

Lees's discovery of William S. Burroughs, the author of Naked Lunch and The Yagé Letters, while still in medical school provided him with the adult version of an imaginary friend, one on a lifelong quest to find a cure for certain mind- and body-destroying drugs. Beneath Burroughs's "lurid descriptions of heroin-laced depravity, sodomy and infanticide in Naked Lunch [which] had been described by a Boston judge as 'a revolting miasma of unrelieved perversion'" (17), and especially in Burroughs's Yagé Letters to Allen Ginsburg, Lees found a kindred soul, a razor-sharp critic of imperious, insensitive, and dehumanizing doctoring, whose now-famous character in Naked Lunch, Dr. Benway, was both a medical beast and one of many voices of a caring visionary on a quest to cure his own junk addiction. While Burroughs's life was one gigantic series of relapses, he did find genuine momentary relief for his morphine addiction in the apomorphine treatment provided by the London doctor Joseph Yerbury Dent in 1956, the potential significance of...