failing to understand the physics lectures. Some of the lecturers were inspiring, some risible. The atmosphere was anxious, verging on hysterical – we were all desperate to become doctors and most of us felt a failure for some reason or other, although as far as I can remember we all passed the final examination.
I then spent two years of pre-clinical studies in the medical school – anatomy, physiology, biochemistry and pharmacology – followed by three years as a clinical student in the hospital. The anatomy involved the students being divided up into small groups and each group was given an embalmed cadaver which we slowly took apart over the course of the year. Not especially attractive to begin with, the cadavers were a sorry sight by the year’s end. The bodies were kept in the Long Room – a large and high attic space with skylights, with half a dozen trolleys on either side with sinister shapes covered by green tarpaulins. The place smelled strongly of formaldehyde.
On the first day of the course, holding our newly purchased dissection manuals with a few instruments in a small canvas roll, we queued up a little nervously on the stairs leading to the Long Room. The doors were opened with a flourish by the Long Room attendant and we went in to be presented to our respective, intact corpses. It was a traditional part of medical education going back hundreds of years but has now been largely abandoned. As a surgeon one has to learn real anatomy all over again – the anatomy of a living, bleeding body is quite different from the greasy, grey flesh of cadavers embalmed for dissection. The anatomy we learnt from dissection was perhaps of limited value, but it was an important initiation rite, marking our transition from the lay world to the world of disease and death and perhaps inuring us to it. It was also quite a sociable process as one sat with a group of fellow students around one’s cadaver, picking and scratching away at dead tissue, learning the hundreds of names that had to be learnt – of the veins and arteries and bones and organ parts and their relations. I remember being particularly fascinated by the anatomy of the hand. There was a plastic bag of severed hands in the anatomy department in various stages of dissection from which I liked to make elaborate, coloured drawings, in imitation of Vesalius.
In 1979 I emerged onto the wards of the hospital where I had trained wearing the long white coat of a junior doctor as opposed to the short white coat of a medical student. I felt very important. Other hospitals, I later noticed to my confusion, had the medical students in long white coats and the junior doctors in short ones. Like a badge of office I proudly carried a pager – known colloquially as a bleep – in the breast pocket with a stethoscope, a tourniquet for blood-taking and a drug formulary in the side pockets. Once you had qualified from medical school you spent a year as a junior house officer – a sort of general dogsbody – with six months working in surgery and six months in medicine. If you wanted a career in hospital medicine as a surgeon or physician – as opposed to becoming a GP – you tried to get a housejob in the teaching hospital where you had trained as a student, so as to make yourself known to the senior doctors, on whose patronage your career entirely depended.
I wanted to be a surgeon – at least I thought I did – so I managed to get a job on a surgical ‘firm’, as it was called, in my teaching hospital. The firm consisted of a consultant, a senior registrar and a junior registrar and the houseman. I worked ‘1 in 2’, which meant I did a normal working day five days a week, but also was on call every other night and every other weekend, so I was in the hospital for about 120 hours a week. My predecessor had handed me over the bleep with a few words of advice about how to keep the boss happy and how to help patients who were dying – neither subject being dealt
I then spent two years of pre-clinical studies in the medical school – anatomy, physiology, biochemistry and pharmacology – followed by three years as a clinical student in the hospital. The anatomy involved the students being divided up into small groups and each group was given an embalmed cadaver which we slowly took apart over the course of the year. Not especially attractive to begin with, the cadavers were a sorry sight by the year’s end. The bodies were kept in the Long Room – a large and high attic space with skylights, with half a dozen trolleys on either side with sinister shapes covered by green tarpaulins. The place smelled strongly of formaldehyde.
On the first day of the course, holding our newly purchased dissection manuals with a few instruments in a small canvas roll, we queued up a little nervously on the stairs leading to the Long Room. The doors were opened with a flourish by the Long Room attendant and we went in to be presented to our respective, intact corpses. It was a traditional part of medical education going back hundreds of years but has now been largely abandoned. As a surgeon one has to learn real anatomy all over again – the anatomy of a living, bleeding body is quite different from the greasy, grey flesh of cadavers embalmed for dissection. The anatomy we learnt from dissection was perhaps of limited value, but it was an important initiation rite, marking our transition from the lay world to the world of disease and death and perhaps inuring us to it. It was also quite a sociable process as one sat with a group of fellow students around one’s cadaver, picking and scratching away at dead tissue, learning the hundreds of names that had to be learnt – of the veins and arteries and bones and organ parts and their relations. I remember being particularly fascinated by the anatomy of the hand. There was a plastic bag of severed hands in the anatomy department in various stages of dissection from which I liked to make elaborate, coloured drawings, in imitation of Vesalius.
In 1979 I emerged onto the wards of the hospital where I had trained wearing the long white coat of a junior doctor as opposed to the short white coat of a medical student. I felt very important. Other hospitals, I later noticed to my confusion, had the medical students in long white coats and the junior doctors in short ones. Like a badge of office I proudly carried a pager – known colloquially as a bleep – in the breast pocket with a stethoscope, a tourniquet for blood-taking and a drug formulary in the side pockets. Once you had qualified from medical school you spent a year as a junior house officer – a sort of general dogsbody – with six months working in surgery and six months in medicine. If you wanted a career in hospital medicine as a surgeon or physician – as opposed to becoming a GP – you tried to get a housejob in the teaching hospital where you had trained as a student, so as to make yourself known to the senior doctors, on whose patronage your career entirely depended.
I wanted to be a surgeon – at least I thought I did – so I managed to get a job on a surgical ‘firm’, as it was called, in my teaching hospital. The firm consisted of a consultant, a senior registrar and a junior registrar and the houseman. I worked ‘1 in 2’, which meant I did a normal working day five days a week, but also was on call every other night and every other weekend, so I was in the hospital for about 120 hours a week. My predecessor had handed me over the bleep with a few words of advice about how to keep the boss happy and how to help patients who were dying – neither subject being dealt
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