High Fever
NESTA PAIN writes documentaries about medicine and about insects, and the ones about insects are the best. Such extraordinary behaviour, especially when set to music. Her programme about smoking and lung cancer was a rush job with no beauty of form, merely recorded opinions strung together; but to the smug non-smoker it was scarcely less fascinating. Such extraordinary behaviour, even if not set to music. I didn’t know whether to admire more those bravely nonchalant souls who were convinced by the figures but meant to go on smoking all the same, or those determined to see nothing in it at all. I wondered how long it would be before indifference turned to resentment and the Medical Research Council comes to have an equivalent meaning to wowser. An adviser to the industry earned his keep with what seemed to me a neat piece of rationalisation. Perhaps, he said, a pre-cancerous condition set up an unconscious. malaise which demanded a compensation such as smoking, so that smoking was the result, not the cause, of lung cancer. But why should only lung cancer arouse such a need? And why, of all possible compensations, only cigarette smoking? There’s no escape for you there, brother. You're doomed, for not being sensible like me
R.D.
McE.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 946, 27 September 1957, Page 25
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212High Fever New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 946, 27 September 1957, Page 25
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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