An Ounce of Cure

James Wheatley has a pain in his toe. It's a small thing, barely worth mentioning, the kind of ache that might come from tight shoes or walking too far. But when he walks into a doctor's office in 1972, he steps into a machine from which there is no easy exit. What follows is a dazzling, horrifying tour de force through the American medical system: specialist begets specialist, test begets test, and Wheatley's innocent little toe becomes the justification for a full-body workup that would bankrupt a pharaoh. Alan Edward Nourse wrote this satire in the early 1970s, but the nightmare he depicts has only grown more recognizable. Each doctor Wheatley encounters sees a different problem, orders a different battery of tests, and passes him along with the gentle reassurances of the professionally baffled. The toe pain, by the end, has become almost incidental to the cascade of mounting anxieties and mounting bills. It's a comic masterpiece about what happens when healthcare becomes a Rube Goldberg machine, and nobody remembers what they were trying to fix in the first place.