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.