The ULTRACREPIDARIAN

     I went to their home as they wanted me to give a lady an injection of IV antibiotic. I started going through all the blood reports and scan reports just to get an idea of what exactly had happened to her. She had endometritis after undergoing a cesarean section. Her Doctor had advised to continue a couple of injections for a few days post discharge. As I was loading the antibiotic in the 10ml syringe, the old man started commenting - " That doctor unnecessarily did cesarean. I told them, we can do normal delivery only. But they wanted to do cesarean " 

I replied - " The Doctor will do cesarean, only if there is an indication. If you can show me the discharge paper I can tell you what the reason was. "

The old man didn't seem convinced, he went on to say - " No. She has had normal deliveries previously. The Doctor did cesarean for money. "

And I chose to be quiet.

It's natural for old people to be adamant. But a latin derived word did come into my mind - ULTRACREPIDARIAN. There's a story behind this word.

Long long ago, so so long ago, nobody can say how long ago - there was a Greek painter by the name of Apellis. He had made a beautiful painting of Alexander the Great which was on display. A shoemaker pointed out to Apellis that the sandals in the painting did not have the required number of loops. Apellis thanked him for pointing this out, and made the necessary corrections. But the shoemaker was not done yet, he started to comment on other aspects of the painting like — the shape of Alexander's legs, his robes, etc.

Apellis put an end to it by saying, “Sutor, ne ultra crepidam”, ie “shoemaker, not above the sandal”. Meaning, don't go beyond the realm of your field of expertise. 

And that's who an ULTRACREPIDARIAN is - one who gives advice and opinions or comments about a matter in which, he himself lacks knowledge. William Hazlitt, the well-known essayist, coined the word ‘ultracrepidarian’ in 1819.

How familiar does that definition sound when we look at people around us or when we look within ourselves. We read a few news papers and become experts in opining how to fix economy; We watch a few YouTube vlogs and start giving "solutions" to world's political crisis; We watch a few news channels and we know which of the two fighting factions is on the right; We read a couple of booklets, and become historians. Whether or not what the sources say is true or not is secondary for us (which most of the times will be misrepresented facts). But what we do have is an opinion to solve these problems. Completely unaware of the ground reality, we intrude ourselves into these polemics & let our tongues loose to speak or shout our opinions at others. And if we were to realize the ground reality, we ourselves would consider what we had previously said to be preposterous.

Well I believe we all do this. With the democratization of knowledge, ultracrepidarianism is at it's peak. Perhaps to avoid it completely is impossible. At some level, we all are ultracrepidarians. But what we can do is to try and avoid speaking about things about which we don't have sound knowledge and leave these debates for the experts. Instead we should try to become experts in our respective fields. But then Hey! who wants to do that? It's just so fun and easy to comment - criticising everything and everyone except ourselves. Ain't that true?