In 1939, Dr. Seuss published a picture book that features numerous cartoon illustrations of seven nude women. The Seven Lady Godivas looks for all the world like any other Dr. Seuss book but, in fact, it was written for and marketed toward an adult audience. Not “adult” as in pornography, but simply as in a book for grown-ups instead of kids. Rather surprisingly, considering the content, it was not a success. Seuss turned his attention back to writing for kids and the rest is, as they say, history.
Flash-forward almost half a century instead of a still mostly unknown thirty-something writer, Seuss is an eighty-something legend ready to make another go at writing for grown-ups. If nude women is on the mind of many thirty-something men, then the state of the health system is uppermost in the minds of most octogenarians. And in the mind of Seuss, the relationship between being growing old and the health system in America was roughly equivalent to the relationship between the Grinch and Christmas. The narrative of You're Only Old Once reveals a critic who hates the whole health care system.
Take, as perhaps just the most immediately obvious bit of corrosive satire, the requisite eye test required of the aging protagonist. Rather than the standard chart with the big E at the top, the “Eyesight and Solvent Test” projects upon the wall the following words for the patient to read:
“Have you any idea how much money these tests are costing you?”
The reality of the exorbitant bills which greet the aging as they become accustomed to knowing multiple specialists by name as a result of seeing them so often has never seemed funnier, though the humor is dark and painful because it is also so truthful:
“When at last we are sure
you’ve been properly pilled,
then a few paper forms
must be properly filled
so that you and your heirs
may be properly billed.”
The expense of maintaining a robust vigor within the American health is at the forefront of the book’s satire, but in the hands of the rhymes and illustrations which really do make the book seem not much different from his children’s book, the cost of staying health is really more a symptom of a larger condition than primary disease. What Seuss is targeting throughout the narrative as the reader follows his protagonist through appointments with various specialists who perform various procedures is the system itself. The villain here is not identified as the doctors or the treatments or even the accountants, but the bureaucratic organization which treats patients like products moving along an assembly line.
In fact, the very last illustrations in the book which appear after thee blank pages following the end of the narrative shows the patient we’ve been following along through this process suspended in the air still stuck inside the Diet-Devising Computerized Sniffer and looking more like a piece of machinery being transported inside a factory than a human being whose health is being attended to by empathetic takers of the Hippocratic Oath.
