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offered researchers tens of millions of dollars to become human guinea pigs! It turns out the headlines were ccurate in every way except for certain words: “Cure” “Cancer,” “Just,” “Around,” and “Corner.”
    For one thing, so far the cure only works on mice. For another, the drug in question is partly synthesized from mouse urine, and at this point it takes two hundred quarts of mouse urine to extract a millionth of an ounce of the drug, which means you would basically have to force-feed a thousand mice a thousand gallons of Gatorade over a thousand years to get enough medicine to shrink a single hemorrhoid.
    By the time all this qualifying data came out, however, the media had lost interest in C ANCER C URE, moving on to yet another Big Medical Story, namely, K ILLER E RECTIONS. Men who took Viagra, the new potency pill, were reported to be dying like germs in a jar of Listerine. Follow-up stories revealed, however, thatthese victims tended to be seventy-five-year-old guys who—suddenly invigorated after twenty years of sexual somnolence—bounded briskly out of bed and into the saddle. Presumably, they died of heart attacks, or of old-lady-style hairpins briskly inserted between the third and fourth rib.
    The press also insists on reporting news of horrifying new diseases and shocking medical errors, terrifying the hypochondriac. Some of these so-called medical mistakes are, of course, exaggerated. For example, I am at this moment looking at an Associated Press story about how the parents of a five-year-old girl are suing a doctor in Texas who was supposed to perform an appendectomy on their daughter but instead removed one of her fallopian tubes. Sure, it
looks
bad for the doctor, but I think we must give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he was unfamiliar with anatomy, and when he asked, “What is that?” and a nurse said, “A fallopian tube,” he panicked and cut it off.
I
sure would. A fallopian tube does not sound like a good thing.
    Still, these are aberrations. Bad medical news is not happening with greater frequency than in yesteryear. It is just that the press is far better at finding and reporting it. Let’s say in 1841 a cholera epidemic wiped out half of Montana. The event would be covered six weeks later, as news trickled in. Journalism in that era was a lot more genteel. Information was disseminated only reluctantly, gradually, in manageable little bursts of increasing gravity, the way one might deliver bad news to an elderly aunt with a weak heart:
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    NEWS OF THE TERRITORIES
    A Distressing Affair
    CHOLERA OUTBREAK
    M ANY S ERIOUS I NDISPOSITIONS R EPORTED
    Fig Poultices Applied
    OUR CO-RESPONDENT’S EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS
    20,000 Dead
    It is reliably reported by cable from, our Co-respondent in. the Northwestern Territorial Provinces, that contrary to more sanguine reports published elsewhere, the most Unfortunate Event has occurred of a medical nature. Horses were not affected. As could best be confirmed by presstime …
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    And so forth.
    Hypochondriacs of earlier years did not even read these stories. In fact, no one read these stories. People bought newspapers for the ads, many of which featured products like Dr. Von Otherwise’s Patented Lip Balm and Heart Tonic, which promised a cure for Neuralgia, The Vapors, Constipation, Dropsy, Quinsy, Pustulating Bronchitis, and Vomitacious Catarrh.
    Nowadays, however, both medicine and the media are better. Hypochondriacs have much more to obsess over.
    On June 23, 1997, for example, the American media and the American medical establishment conspired to perpetrate the greatest assault ever on hypochondriacs. On that day, the American Diabetes Association officially announced—and the media dutifully reported—that it had lowered the blood glucose levels necessary to diagnose a person as having diabetes. Overnight,they created a serious health problem for tens of