Читать книгу Confessions of a Doctor - Stanley Feldman - Страница 13

Eric Crook operated at the Westminster Hospital annexe at the Gordon Hospital in the Vauxhall Bridge Road. He was a typical old-school ‘gentleman surgeon’ and certainly the politest surgeon I ever met. If I arrived late he would wave aside an apology and instead insist he was at fault for being early. His anaesthetist was of a different type and he had the habit of starting the day by telling a risqué joke which Eric would appear to find funny but which I could sense was actually causing him a great deal of embarrassment.

Once, when he was performing an operation while teaching the assembled medical students, Eric pointed out that the blueish colour of the tissue in the wound around an anal fistula was typical of tuberculosis inflammation. A few minutes later, when the anaesthetist replaced the oxygen cylinder, which had run out, with a full one, the patient’s tuberculosis inflammation miraculously disappeared. Eric was totally nonplussed by the suddenness of the cure.

Perhaps the best-known surgeon who operated at the Gordon Hospital was Lawrence Abel, a great friend of Dixon Wright. Both were superb technical surgeons but both were surgically arrogant and lacking in any bedside manner. Their treatment of patients and junior staff would not be acceptable today, although there are few surgeons who can match their dexterity. They were good surgeons but indifferent doctors.

Lawrence Abel would often see his patients for the first time in the anaesthetic room, the diagnosis and decision to operate having been made by the registrar. There the patient, a little groggy from the effect of the premedication, would see the famous surgeon who would be holding his life in his hands. Unfortunately, more often than not his surgeon would be wearing a white operating shirt top but no trousers; instead he usually had on boxer shorts covered with pictures of bees, bearing the words, ‘I am a busy bee’. But once the patient was on the operating table Abel displayed a masterly surgical ability. I never heard a patient complain about his somewhat unusual attire and his bizarre manner, but in those days it was very rare for any patient ever to complain about his surgeon, who was generally regarded as a god.

On one occasion, when Abel was operating upon a private patient who had cancer of the colon, the patient’s private GP, who had come to observe the procedure (and collect an assistant’s fee), remarked casually that he suspected the patient also had gallstones. Abel put his hand up under the patient’s ribcage and after a couple of deft snips with the scissors produced the gall bladder which he threw to the GP with the remark, ‘You can see for yourself if you were right’.

Abel was a difficult surgeon to work with; he had little concept of timekeeping and would often keep the theatre staff waiting for hours before he appeared, offering no apology or excuse. He insisted that such were his skills that his patients did not need any intravenous infusions or blood during the operation and, being a god-like creature, he usually had his way. This often led to the anaesthetist having to resuscitate a dehydrated, shocked victim by starting a blood transfusion the moment he left the operating theatre – not always an easy thing to do.