Barf

If you can read this profile of “superman” Bill Frist, A Doctor at Heart, without wanting to hurl all over every surface in your immediate vicinity, you’ve got a stronger constitution than I have.

This journalistic hand-job is about the grossest thing I’ve ever read, making Frist out to be some sort of doctor-god, who oozes compassion from every pore and works miracles while Bless the Beasts and the Children softly plays in the background. This is, after all, the same man who used his credentials as a doctor to (incorrectly) diagnose Terri Schiavo via video as part of a cynical political ploy, and who adopted cats from animal shelters under the guise of giving them a good home only to kill them to practice his surgical skills—an inconvenient little bit of ickiness that haunts him yet, and was no doubt precisely what the glowing account of his surgery to save the life of a gorilla was meant to counter.

Frist listened to the heart; the gorilla's lub-dub sounded human. "When you're this close, you feel this kind of oneness with them," Frist said. The stink of ape sweat and gorilla testosterone soaked his hair and clothes. "Gorillas, people, men. You look at the people here, a symphonic flow of people pitching in. It's the oneness of humanity."

Blech. I smell something all right, but I don’t think it’s “gorilla testosterone.”