Diane Holyoak

The year is 1956. Your mother is expecting you, and her doctor smokes through the appointment. More doctors smoke Camels than any other brand, the adverts say, and he tells her a few a day will settle her nerves and keep the baby small for an easy birth. The year is 1960. Your first proper shoes come from a shop with an X-ray machine in the corner. You slide your feet into the slot and watch your own toe bones wriggle, green and glowing, while the assistant checks the fit. You go back every time your feet grow. The year is 1961. Your mother is expecting your sister and the sickness is bad. The chemist has a new tablet, advertised as completely safe in pregnancy. Your sister arrives the next year alongside 10,000 other babies whose mothers took it, and some of them arrive without arms. The year is 1964. Three sore throats, so the tonsils come out, as they do for over a million children a year on both sides of the Atlantic. Twenty beds, and the promise of ice cream. Nobody asks what the tonsils were for. They were the immune system, and the operation never did much for the throats. The year is 1972. You are sixteen and every car on earth runs on leaded petrol. The lead comes out of the exhaust and settles on the playground, the vegetable patch and the blood of every child walking to school. The men who put it in the petrol knew what it did to a brain in the 1920s. The ban arrives in your forties. The year is 1981. Your mother's hands have gone stiff. The doctor has a new arthritis tablet with the biggest launch the drug industry has ever mounted. Two years later it is pulled on both sides of the Atlantic, with dozens of pensioners dead whose kidneys could not clear it. She gets off lightly: the sun burns her on it, and she spends a summer behind the curtains. The year is 1991. Your father is diabetic, and the dietitian hands him a sheet. More than half his calories are to come from carbohydrate: bread, potatoes, pasta, cereal. His sugar goes up on it, so his insulin goes up with it, and his waist follows. He does as he is told for twenty years. The year is 1998. Your back has gone. The doctor has a new opioid, and the rep carries a letter from a medical journal saying addiction on it is under 1%. The letter is five sentences long. The company pleads guilty twice, and by the second time more than half a million Americans are dead. The year is 2002. Your knees hurt, and the doctor has a new pill that is kinder on the stomach. You take it for two years, the same two years the maker is sitting on its own heart data. It is withdrawn with as many as 140,000 heart attacks laid at its door. Your heart was fine. The man next door's was not. The year is 2008. Your wife has a prolapse after three children, and the surgeon fits a strip of plastic mesh. Once the tissue grows through it, it cannot come out. Australia apologises to its women in 2018, America bans it in 2019, Britain apologises in 2020. Your wife gets hers by press release. The year is 2026. You are seventy, and the new doctor has a screen and a number for everything. The meat on your plate is a hazard. The oil in the bottle is good for your heart. The injection is for life. He is the age the first doctor was when he lit a Camel in front of your mother, and every bit as sure. Not one of them was a rogue. Every one was the standard of care, taught to the next doctor, printed on the leaflet, and handed to a family with no way to check it. You have spent seventy years as the experiment. The results come out after you are gone, under somebody else's name, and the chair you are sitting in is where they recruit for the next one.