A Statement Regarding My Future as a World Leader in Medicine

Note: Like the rest of you, I am alternating between catatonic depression and apoplectic fury at the recent shameful ordeal of a certain Professor Jason Arday of Cambridge University, and his subsequent resignation. Although my own life has been quite tumultuous of late, I had been managing to keep things more or less together, until now, that is. Witnessing such a brutal public inquisition of a respected scholar has left me deeply rattled and disoriented. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I am therefore forced to cope in the customary manner of a public intellectual: by issuing a formal statement that brings as much attention to me as possible.

Dear Colleagues,

It is with profound sadness that I announce my immediate resignation from the medical profession, and hereby renounce my titles of Chief Professor of Psychiatry at Cambridge University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins, Fermilab, the Guggenheim Museum, SeaWorld, and the Federated States of Micronesia.

When I became the youngest physician in world history, it was, without a doubt, the greatest honor of my professional life. When I was still a boy, I wouldn’t have imagined the Icarus-like heights I would go on to reach, as I had to overcome the challenging disability of being blind, deaf, mute, and paralyzed from the eyeballs down, from birth until I was thirteen years old. But with the encouragement of my devoted family and the raw power of hope, I was finally able to discover my love of seeing, hearing, talking, and moving my body normally. By the time I was fourteen I was able to accomplish my earliest childhood dreams of solo swimming across the Atlantic Ocean and winning first place in the International Proto-Indo-European Language Spelling Bee.

As I wrote in the thesis for my second PhD, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” This is the spirit that would later drive me to set the deadlift world record at 1,200 pounds. But it was the power of perseverance and hope that allowed me to do all that a mere six months after breaking every bone in my body in a fall during my successful solo climb of K2. After I had reached the limits of my physical performance, however, I decided to direct my efforts toward helping all of humanity, however I could.

As a physician, I have treated close to 10,000,000 patients in my career. The lives of those patients, every one of which I saved, are what really matter to me. Recent reporting, however, has attempted to reduce my lifetime of service to a handful of narrow and dry “factual” questions concerning my widely documented personal and professional accomplishments. Before addressing these further, however, we must recognize how offensive it is that these journalists are requesting “evidence” of my treating these patients in the first place. Do they not realize that their even asking for “evidence” inherently invalidates those patients’ lived experiences, and indeed their very existence? I wasn’t aware that we now live in such a low-trust society where people can’t just take a physician’s word for it anymore.

Therefore, I have reached the limit of what any physician could reasonably be expected to endure: a follow-up question. Beyond that point, further demands for evidence become, quite frankly, indistinguishable from harassment.

Given the laundry list of baseless accusations now circulating, I will not dignify the latest insinuation that I did not discover lithium. Furthermore, I have never claimed “sole credit” for the fall of the Berlin Wall. I totally reject the suggestion that I exaggerated my role in the eradication of smallpox, and I refuse to respond to the increasingly offensive questions regarding my key role in the rescue of those Chilean miners. And to clarify, when I said I “directed The Terminator,” the context makes perfectly clear that what I meant was that I provided informal consultation to James Cameron during production, or perhaps it was that I once saw a documentary about James Cameron and thought it was pretty cool. Either way, I have no intention of reopening the debate over whether it was Mr. Cameron or I who first said “I’ll be back.”

To the journalists at PBS and C-SPAN requesting contemporaneous accounts to “verify” my participation in the Yalta Conference, I say to you that as a humble public servant, I didn’t do my job for the sake of appearing in your “contemporaneous accounts”—I did it for the public good.

Regarding my personal and professional accomplishments more generally, I did not pursue these achievements for public recognition. In almost every case, in fact, I took extreme care to ensure that there were no documents or witnesses or recordings of any kind. A life of service cannot be reduced to such crude things as written records, eyewitness accounts, dates, and diplomas verifying that your MD is “actually real”. Perhaps this insistence on providing evidence for extraordinary achievements is merely society’s way of punishing people like me for being extraordinary? But, as my mother always whispered to me as a baby in the crib, “Heavy is the head that wears the crown.” I, however, value humility above all, and am happy to do my work largely behind the scenes. For example, while I was recovering from donating my third kidney, the Nobel Committee decided not to announce my award publicly out of respect for my privacy.

At the end of the day, however, the question is not really about whether or not these things happened. My critics have confused factual accuracy with a higher and more sublime truth. The real question is what my accomplishments mean to the millions of people who are inspired by believing they happened.

This is why I cannot continue in my current professional role. Medicine once valued daring, innovation, and imagination. But now, all anyone does is “check the chart” and “verify” and “get the basic facts right”. I can no longer work in a field that refuses to support the imaginations of exceptional people such as myself. A field that treats chronology as a fixed sequence of events, as opposed to more of an expressionistic canvas, is not one suited to my particular talents.

Therefore, at this time I will step back from the media spotlight and officially relinquish not only my various professorships, but also my myriad UN appointments, ambassadorships, top-secret clearances, and my AMC Stubs A-List membership. I will take this time to focus on my children and family. As I take this time to heal, I find renewed strength from meditating on a saying that I myself coined a few years ago: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

I’ll be back,

Dr. Napoleon Doogie Howser Marquis de Sade House, M.D., Ph.D., F.B.I., C.I.A.