The denunciation of Andrea Purgatori’s family members for the alleged diagnostic and therapeutic errors committed on the disease that killed the journalist is the accumulation of some trends in our society. Here are which ones. The italics of Battista Falconi
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The complaint presented by Andrea Purgatori’s family to the judiciary, for alleged diagnostic and therapeutic errors committed with respect to the fulminating illness that killed the well-known journalist, is the accumulation of some relevant trends in today’s society. The first is the guilt that afflicts healthcare and of which there is clear knowledge, given that the self-candidacies of lawyers who offer to protect the relatives of patients who died in hospital are promoted without too much shame, inducing them to file a lawsuit with the premise that the lawyer’s fee will be paid only in the event of victory in the civil court: a percentage of the established compensation, that is. As if to say: so why not give it a try?
In this trend we find in turn the intersection of two cultural attitudes. The first is the rejection of death. We no longer surrender to the idea that we get sick and that diseases can be invincible, lethal, ineluctable. Let’s think of the rhetoric surrounding cancer in particular, often and superficially presented as a pathology from which one can always escape, provided it is prevented, identified early and treated with the adequate treatments that medical and scientific research would now make available to us. Things are actually very different and are much less rosy, unfortunately. Healthcare guilt, if we want to call it that, however falls within the general one, in the idea that when something negative happens there is always someone responsible and that this can, indeed must, be identified and punished. Theme of which we have already spoken in recent days.
In the specific case of Purgatori, however, another theme probably comes into play. That for which, when a public figure falls ill and eventually dies, these natural and common events, inescapable in the experience of any human being, become a fact of public interest. It is an inveterate custom which in the past centuries has also produced metaphysical convictions, such as the one which linked the health of kings to that of the kingdoms entrusted to them, and which has now in some way been “democratised”. Therefore the public figure, or in this case also his family members, when he contracts a pathology considers it his duty, almost more than his right, to report it to the world.
The case of Michela Murgia is the most striking of the last, but also the triumph of Ada d’Adamo with her book Come d’aria, which won the Strega prize after the disappearance of its author (who moreover, in the novel, tells her story as the mother of a daughter with a serious and disabling congenital pathology), is another indicative demonstration. For Purgatori, in reality, until his disappearance, a strong secrecy about his state of health had been maintained, so much so that the news of his death amazed and even more dismayed many people, but now the family’s choice to file a complaint brings the story back to the bed of the general coming out from which we all seem to be involved by now.
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2023-07-22 20:28:40
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