Tag Archives: stethoscope

What Happens When You Become a Doctor

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Any day now and it’ll be the Killing Season, so-called. August 1 is the date when a fresh crop of newbie doctors arrives on hospital wards, bursting with enthusiasm and theoretical knowledge but woefully lacking in experience.

Jeremy's scalpel

In fact August is no longer worthy of that macabre tag. The month now begins with a sensible induction process for newly qualified doctors, with proper training in the tasks and procedures they’ll need to do in the coming months. Gone are the days of ‘See one, do one, teach one.’ The Killing Season is well and truly dead. Induction is a recent trend. I will never forget the utter panic on my first day as a doctor as I crept around in squeaky new shoes trying not to look like the rawest recruit. It was a Sunday—was there ever a more stupid day to start work?—and a patient had the misfortune of dying within 45 minutes of my arrival at the hospital. Now don’t jump to conclusions. I hadn’t even seen her before she died.

HP Rapaport Sprague stethoscope, circa 1981

HP Rapaport Sprague stethoscope, circa 1981

Wet behind the ears, I had no idea of the procedure to follow. Even scarier was the realization that I had two whole wards full of people to keep alive as long as possible. I rushed round to say hello to them all and check they were still breathing. At the same time, I said goodbye to many things: sleep, leisurely weekends, sitting on the loo without being bleeped. In short, to normal life. iv nutrition

While a lot has changed since then, including working hours, some things haven’t, as I realized from a recent blog post by Salma Aslam (by which I mean Dr Salma Aslam) Transitional state: med student to doctor.  It all came back to me. When you graduate from medical school, you may get a number of different reactions. 1 “Well done, but don’t go round thinking you know it all.” Don’t worry, I didn’t. And still don’t. 2 “So what?” That’s what I got from a group of arts students sitting around in the bar. They acted like they couldn’t care less about my news, but they were probably envious. 3 “Can you have a look at my verruca?”

plantar warts

Count yourself lucky. It’s much worse to be subjected to the long saga, in multiple episodes, of their entire medical history. This is when you get envious of those jobless arts graduates. 4 “The only thing that works for my migraines/arthritis/autism is kinesiology/homeopathy/acupuncture.” The implication is that allopathic medicine does nothing. Well, I’ll keep an open mind about that, only not so open that my brain falls out.

tablets

5 “You should get a job as a medical adviser on Casualty or something.” Yeah, right. Like nobody else with more experience wants to do it. 6 Perhaps the weirdest reaction was from my mother, who insisted I should now call her Dr Cooper. Why? “Because my daughter is a doctor, it’s like I’m the doctor. You may congratulate me now.” Get used to all of it. It may be a while before you hear the most welcome response of all: “Thanks, doc. I feel a lot better.”

medical bag

Easy tweet: What happens when you become a #doctor? http://wp.me/p3uiuG-12N via @DrCarolCooper #medicine

Ham and Eggs with Mr Turner

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It was lovely to sit down for two and a half hours with my mobile turned off. On the minus side, I had to put up with caricatures that would have done Harry Enfield and Chums proud. In the lead role is an on-form Timothy Spall doing his best-ever impression of Timothy Spall’s rendition of Timothy Spall.

His gurning is magnificent, his grunts fit for a piggery at feeding time. It all helps establish JMW Turner’s origins: his father was a barber and his mother a lunatic (as it was termed in Victorian times). The artist’s inarticulacy is well portrayed, but I didn’t see the need to over-egg the pudding, turning him and his housekeeper into Wayne and Waynetta Slob. 

There is also much gasping, groaning, staggering and falling about, all of which sharpens the contrast between Turner and his colleagues at the Royal Academy (filmed at Wentworth Woodhouse near Rotherham, South Yorkshire). There we have John Carew, David Roberts, John Constable, John Singer Sargent, Sir John Soane and others. The more Turner grunts, the more they twirl, ponder, recoil, ponce about and generally over-act.

Then Mike Leigh takes the piss out of the Ruskin family who come across as unbearably pseud.

I can't show you a Turner. Go to the Tate Britain.

I can’t show you a Turner here. Go to the Tate Britain.

The film Mr Turner goes to huge lengths (or, as the Daily Mail puts it, ‘amazing tricks’) to make the film authentic in every detail. Doctors did house calls in those days, though I’m not sure how Leigh induces Dr Price to come to London all the way from Margate for a simple home visit, especially since, in the film, Margate has quietly slipped west to Cornwall.

Still, the stethoscope is spot on as the simple tube invented by Frenchman René Laënnec.  His name is pronounced ‘Le Neck’ though this isn’t where doctors wore it at the time. The binaural model used today only came into production in 1851, the year Turner died. 

HP Rapaport Sprague stethoscope, circa 1981

HP Rapaport Sprague stethoscope, circa 1981

I liked Turner’s last mistress Mrs Booth (played by Dorothy Atkinson) who bears more than a passing resemblance to my ex-husband’s new wife. And Marion Bailey is a superb depiction of loyal housekeeper Hannah Danby, not least for the evolution of her psoriasis. First we see her scratching her neck, but later her scaly skin turns rampant. As the years pass, she becomes increasingly stooped and rigid, probably from psoriatic arthropathy which affects some 10% of people with psoriasis.

Turner’s eccentricity and talent come across well, as does the progression of his style of painting. Many of the images are genuinely beautiful. But the acting? More ham than a Bavarian market.

This is just my opinion. In no way does it represent the views of my husband (who thought we had booked to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), let alone the rest of the movie world. I’m sure everyone else will absolutely love the film to bits, darling.