Confessions of a Doctor. Stanley Feldman
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This tale would not have been written but for the insistence of my colleagues. They, like me, have many happy memories of our time in medicine and felt that, in the rapidly changing world of the hospital from the early days of the NHS to recent times, there should be a record of what life used to be like.
I would like to pay tribute to the doctors and nurses with whom I have had the pleasure to work. Had we not all shared the common goal of seeing that our patients received the best treatment possible, no matter what the personal cost, then many of the events chronicled in this book would not have occurred and we would not be able to look back at those times with so much pleasure and satisfaction.
I would like to acknowledge the enormous part played by the theatre staff at the Westminster and Chelsea hospitals in this story. They put up with my idiosyncrasies over many years with benign fortitude.
In particular, I would like to pay a special tribute to my wife Carole, who has inspired me, cajoled me, and who has participated in so many of the events described in this book. Without her help this book would probably not have been written.
Stanley Feldman 2012
CONTENTS
Title Page
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
IN THE BEGINNING
THE DOCTOR’S TALE
HOSPITAL LIFE: THE WAY WE WERE
MEDICAL SCHOOL
THE HOUSE JOBS
ANAESTHESIA
THE BERNARD JOHNSON ADVISER
A DOCTOR’S LIFE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Copyright
I was pronounced dead in 2008.
It was when I met a colleague from ‘down under’ who stared at me as though he had seen a ghost that I discovered that my obituary had been published in an Australian medical journal in 2008.
It is sobering to have advance warning of one’s demise, but it prompted me to set about recording some of the many funny tales (both funny peculiar and funny amusing) of my time in medicine which form the basis of this book. Up till then, I had frequently referred to some of the more outrageous events during after-dinner talks, but the notice of my untimely demise was the spur to chronicle them with a sense of urgency. The result is Confessions of a Doctor.
I have used a loosely biographical format in order to give some structure to what otherwise would be a series of anecdotes and to give me a chance to give vent to some of my personal ‘grumpy old man’ views.
All the stories included here are based on fact although some have been dramatised, or the circumstances in which they occurred changed, in order to save the blushes of those involved. If in retelling of these events I have caused offence to any person involved, it was unintentional. I regard myself as having been especially fortunate in having colleagues who, as well as being very good doctors, enjoyed a great sense of humour and an ability to laugh at themselves. This book is intended to amuse and entertain, and to give the reader a peep into what hospital life was like in by-gone days.
I used to think I was born at the age of nine. I have only a very hazy recollection of anything that happened to me before that age. It is as if in 1939, just as I was reaching my tenth birthday, fear about the approaching war cast a fog over my childhood memories.
Looking at a photograph of myself as a youngster in the second row of pupils at the Burdett-Coutts primary school in Westminster, a stone’s throw from the Abbey, brings back fleeting memories of my schooldays. I can vaguely recall St George’s Day being celebrated, when the flag of St George was flown from the flagpole and a schoolmistress played ‘An English Country Garden’ on an old upright piano as we marched around the playground.
Perhaps the grudging smile on my face in the picture is recognition of life’s paradoxes. There we were, solemnly saluting the flag in that small, dark, barren concrete yard surrounded by a high brick wall in the centre of London, singing at the tops of our voices about the joys of the flowers in an English country garden – although few of the children had ever ventured further than their home on the local Peabody Estate, and most were totally ignorant of any of the pleasures of a country garden.
Reflecting on those days and the years that followed, it is the odd events, the funny things that happened during my life that ensued, that I can most readily recall. Anxieties, that appeared disastrous at the time, have become unimportant, even amusing when viewed through the wrong end of the telescope of time.
AN EVACUEE
In the summer of 1939, I was coming up for ten when war broke out. It may well have been the psychological trauma and worry about the inevitability of the impending conflict that jogged my memory into existence at that time. Even today, I can re-live the increasing anxiety and gloom that accompanied the build-up to war – the men filling sandbags; the family gathering around the wireless anxious to hear every news bulletin; the preparation for mobilisation; the ARP (Air Raid Protection) posters; the issuing of gasmasks and the gas drills. And then the culmination in that broadcast announcement by Neville Chamberlain on 3 September that, ‘Today we are at war’.
There were the whispered conversations about ‘evacuation’. With them came the realisation that our lives were about to be abruptly changed, our family was to be split up, and my sister and I were to be separated from Mum and Dad. We were entering a new era, one of uncertainty and loss. After many anguished discussions, our parents decided that it would be better if both of us were evacuated together. Like most schools at that time, ours were single sex institutions which meant that my sister and I attended different neighbourhood schools and we were quite likely to be evacuated to different parts of the country. This would have caused enormous logistical problems for our parents in trying to make regular visits to both of us, and it was decided that the solution was for us both to be registered at the same school. So it was that I became a temporary girl, a member of the rather snooty Grey Coat Hospital School for Girls. To my great relief I was not the only male in the school; there were two other boys several years older.
It was on a sad September day that, clutching our one bag per child and a cardboard box containing our gasmask, we set off as evacuees from Victoria Station on a journey into the unknown. No one knew our destination, or those that did weren’t telling. I remember arriving at our new school later that day and seeing the imposing building surrounded by trees and rolling green lawns. This was our ‘safe haven’ – the famous Roedean girls’ public school near Brighton on the Sussex coast.
It obviously came as a shock to our hosts to find that in addition to the large influx of girl evacuees, there were three young persons wearing trousers. It fell to them