“How I love to read my name on envelopes,” says Antoine Roquentin in Nausea. But, oh, to read your name on the back page of Dr. Leonard’s Catalog, “America’s Leading Discount Healthcare Catalog,” is to be confirmed into a world of abject dependency. Two years ago, inexplicably, Dr. Leonard’s Catalog began arriving at my house. Perhaps I made the mistake of ordering a pair of arch supports from a company that passed along my name and address to the people at Dr. Leonard’s Healthcare, Inc., Edison, NJ, as a candidate for an Invacare® Rollite™ Rollator, an “Invisible” Tummy Trimmer, a Deluxe Gopher Pick-Up and Reaching Tool. Maybe I’m at high risk for diabetes and Dr. Leonard’s wants me to realize that soon I’ll be needing a few pairs of extra-wide Diabetic Men’s Dress Socks. Once a month, tucked around my credit-card statements, exotic postcards, scented love letters from fellow members of my Ivy League dating service, and further proof of my thundering vitality, is Dr. Leonard’s four-color catalog, showcasing a handful of solemnly necessary items among hundreds of outrageously superfluous ones. Need an alarm clock? How about an alarm clock that laser-projects the time onto your bedroom ceiling? Your caftan is okay, I guess, but is it a Dazzling Zip-Front Caftan? Always wanted a Jumbo Satin Sleep Cap, but couldn’t find one that accommodated the “fullest hairstyles?” Now you have, thanks to Dr. Leonard and his rumbling cart of wares, belching black smoke, bringing a little more doubt and a little more death into your life.

THE DOC’S DIAGNOSIS

Once the catalogs started arriving at my house, it didn’t take long to come to the following conclusions about eponymous Dr. Leonard. (1) He’s a quack. (2) His customers are mostly elderly, and he thinks they are remarkably stupid. (3) The world dramatized in the pages of his catalog pullulates with decay. His confidence game begins with a tacit diagnosis, “Your life’s a mess.” I’m incontinent and I’m pestered by squirrels, deer, skunks, mosquitoes, bats. Coarse black hairs are fixing to overtake my once-pristine nostrils and one day this cheap store-bought cane is going let me down. My back is a topography of itches I can’t reach, pains I can’t abide, lotion-deprived places I can’t get to (lucky there’s the Long-Reach Lotion Applicator, $12.99).

And my feet… my feet are a damn orgy of misery. Morning till night, I am hounded by calluses and bunions and corns; weak ankles; fallen/falling arches; ingrown toenails; too-tough-to-cut toenails; too-brittle toenails; cracked heels; sundry fungi; hammertoes; overlapping toes. For which Dr. Leonard’s offers a panoply of correctives, from the Electric Callus Remover (like a Smurf disc-sander), to gauzes and salves, to...