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THE DOCTOR’S TALE

It was not easy to get into medical school at the end of the war, as a minimum of 70 per cent of student places was reserved for those returning from the armed forces. Fortunately there were no qualms about giving the majority of the remaining places to men rather than to women. The Women’s Liberation Movement and the Equal Rights laws had yet to make any impact on those selecting the future doctors and dentists for the country. Indeed, many Deans were unabashed misogynists.

One Dean explained that he believed that if a girl was good-looking she did not need a career in medicine and if she wasn’t, then medicine wasn’t enough! Their prejudice gave me a chance of a place in this highly competitive system, and in 1951, at the age of 21, I was fortunate to win a scholarship to Westminster Medical School to train to be a doctor.

Like several other ancient medical establishments, Westminster Medical School had no pre-clinical teaching facilities. This meant studying anatomy, physiology and biochemistry at the nearby King’s College in the Strand. Although King’s had some excellent science departments, the college had been founded as a religious seminary and even in the 1950s science was considered far less important in the teaching hierarchy than religion and law.

KING’S COLLEGE LONDON

In the post-war era most medical schools were a mix of MASH and Doctor in the House, and the large numbers of ex-service students created a racy environment of mature men who had spent many years in the armed forces. They were naturally rebellious when confronted with any petty restriction, always ready to ‘have a go’. They were bloody-minded and not easily browbeaten by the urbane superiority of eminent, successful consultants, who, with their large Harley Street practices and equally large incomes, were more used to dealing with errant servants than ex-soldiers. But, before qualifying to walk the wards with the ‘Sir Lancelot Sprats’ of the medical establishment, there was anatomy, physiology and biochemistry to master.

We were divided into groups of three in the anatomy department at King’s College. Each group was designated to work on a particular part of a formalin-smelling, leathery-coated, shrunken corpse. Contrary to popular belief, the bodies appeared totally inanimate and were treated as such. There were few ribald jokes and little, if any, inappropriate treatment of the bodies; they could just as well have been made of wax. Each group of three students set about dissecting a limb or the abdomen, the thorax or the head and neck. One of the groups would hold the dissection manual and read out the instructions while the other two would take turns with the scalpel and forceps. Every nerve, fibre, muscle and tendon were carefully separated and displayed so that a mental note could be noted of its origins, destination and position relative to other structures. Each week a demonstrator, usually a surgeon in training, would test us on what we had learnt.

After the bodies were dissected and reduced to their basic bits and pieces, each carcass was returned to its particular wooden box. But, as it had to weigh the same as it did when it was delivered, there was invariably a hunt around for ‘make weight’ pieces of wood and bone before the box lid was finally sealed down.

Today, human body dissection is no longer part of the anatomy class syllabus in most medical schools. That’s a pity. There is no doubt that the appreciation of the relationships of the various structures of which the body is made up has been invaluable knowledge to me and to many of my colleagues in our various careers. The notion that only surgeons need to know anatomy denies present-day doctors an essential insight into the way our bodies are put together.

Our anatomy group consisted of an ex-service tank commander with a gammy leg, Brian, a super fit athletic product of a Grammar School, and me, but amongst the other teams working on our body I remember Roy the best. He was an ex-army captain whose father was a doctor. In June that year Roy had been accepted for Medical School to start in September but he had found the commanding officer of his army unit, stationed in the Far East, unsympathetic to his pleas for an early release from the service. Frustrated and cross he had spent a weekend leave with two friends in neighbouring Hong Kong.

They had all got terribly drunk and on the Star Ferry, on the way back to their base, he had thrown most of the lifebelts overboard. At the subsequent court of inquiry he was asked the rather silly question, ‘What made you do it’ to which he replied, that he ‘could not bear to see all the little fish drowning’. To his delight he was punished by being dishonourably discharged from the army – in time for him to start his medical career.

Another ex- army student was a little Welshman, Garry. Like many of the students, although he pursued his studies enthusiastically from Monday to Friday, Garry’s life revolved around rugby. On Saturday he was to be found on the sportsground as scrum-half for one or other Welsh rugby team. This was invariably followed by a night of heavy drinking. His Sundays were devoted to God, nursing his hangover in a local Chapel, so that he would be fit for his studies on Monday morning.

Brian, the star athlete of our group, was soon part of the college cricket and rugby teams, and he spent every Wednesday afternoon training at the college grounds at Cobham – but Wednesday was also a time designated for dissection. In his absence we set about dissecting the body with gusto, and unfortunately this usually left Brian with little more than gristle and bone to examine when he returned to the college the following day. Even now, he attributes his success as one of the leading lights of orthopaedic surgery to having missed out as a medical student on the anatomy of almost everything, except bones, joints and gristle.

Our physiology professor was a stocky, bad-tempered man. Perhaps his unsympathetic persona owed something to the uncompromising put-down he received when he published his life’s work, a book titled Sane Psychiatry. The review was short and to the point: ‘this book is neither sane nor psychiatry’. The ex-servicemen in our group lost no time in displaying enlarged copies of the review around the college.

My time at King’s was academically uninspiring – involving a lot of ‘learning by rote’ rather than by enquiry and investigation – however it did lead to friendships that I am delighted to say have sustained to this day. Somehow, all but a handful of the students managed to scrape through the second MB examination. With this hurdle behind us we had our pass to the world of real doctors, the hospital wards and sick patients.