The foot is an undervalued, uncomplaining beast that deserves a doctor of its own - Joe Bennett

Like most parts of the body, feet are taken for granted, writes Joe Bennett.

Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton-based writer and columnist. He has been writing a column since 2017.

OPINION

Before I took my foot to the doctor, I went to the dictionary. Podiatrist turned out to be Greek, of course, from “podos”, foot, and “iatros”, physician. Oh, they were clever, those Greeks, fathers of poetry, tragedy, mathematics, philosophy, democracy, the very cast of your mind and mine, and now foot doctoring. Have we done anything much since then?

I wanted to ask the podiatrist: Why podiatry? What induced him to choose the foot? Though even as I thought of asking, I could sense the gist of an answer, that the unconsidered foot was the base of all things human, our foundation. Take the feet from under someone and there’s nothing he can do. The foot is our passport. We are a going-somewhere species and without feet we’d have gone nowhere. So, it could perhaps be argued that where dust meets dust, where flesh meets the soil, it sprang from, is where the truth of us lies, that sole is soul, or some such. So why not be a doctor of the foot? It is an honourable thing.

Like most parts of the body, feet are taken for granted, presumed on, often abused. We cram them into nylon socks, and shoes that weren’t built for them, then gaze in wonder at their malformations and recoil in horror at their stench. As we age and stiffen, our feet grow ever more distant, become remote outposts of the empire whose wellbeing we take increasingly on trust, and to whose welfare we pay less and less attention. Until the day of revolution comes to the land of Podos and something goes wrong. “Oh, oh, oh,” we cry, “My feet are killing me,” all while disregarding the truth that we have spent a semi-century or so doing all we might to kill our feet.

The foot, then, is an undervalued beast, and an uncomplaining one, that fully deserves a doctor of its own, one who loves it for its own sake, a podophile.

When Dr Pod ushered me into his consulting room, I sensed him studying my gait, and immediately I forgot how to walk naturally. The Greeks knew all about the subconscious becoming self-conscious. They told the story of Oedipus.

“Before we start,” said the doc, “Would you mind if AI listened in?”

I begged, as you can well imagine, his pardon.

“Would you mind,” he repeated, “If artificial intelligence listened in on the consultation?”, and he explained how the clever thing would pay attention to everything we said and take notes and at the end of our little tete-a-tete would produce a summary of what was said of medical significance but would somehow sieve out all that was incidental or peripheral. He’d show me at the end, and I would be impressed, he said. But it was up to me.

“Heigh ho,” I said, “Why not! Let little AI be the third in the room, our silent witness and medical stenographer. I look forward to seeing how he fares.”

But I spoke with forked tongue. For even as I welcomed AI’s presence, I was hatching plans. I would interlace my foot-talk with other stuff, with chit-chat and with jokes, with anecdote and tricky metaphor, and maybe even a smattering of naughty foreign languages. All to test the intelligence of intelligence.

Because instinctively, I did not want the thing to work. This was partly, of course, an old man’s fear and hatred of the new. But it was also something else. If the boffins were ever to succeed in using their intelligence to build a new intelligence, a thing with the capacity for independent thought, then they’d assume the power of gods. The Greeks had abundant myths of men who sought the power of gods. None ended well.

I shed my shoe and sock, and the good doctor cradled the foot as if he truly cherished it and - but you have no interest in my foot. You have an interest in an artificial thinking thing. “Want to look at the notes?” asked Dr Pod when we had finished, and he turned the screen my way.

The notes were faultless, an eerily exact transcription of all that had been said of feet and related matters but with every last bit of anything else winnowed out. A party trick? An act that’s effectively mechanical rather than intelligent? I cannot say. I don’t know enough to say. But had I been Greek, I think I would have thought of Icarus, the darling boy who flew too close to the sun.