Doctor in Love by Richard Gordon Read Free Book Online Page A

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    I hesitated.
    “I apologize for asking,” he said quickly. “You’ll be through your Primary this shot, and you’ll have your Fellowship in your pocket by Christmas. You’ll be in Harley Street soon enough. Then you can be sure of getting some cases from an old has-been like me.”
    He spent the rest of the meal talking about Test Matches.
    I took the Primary Fellowship a fortnight later. In the days before the National Health Service the examination was conducted for a handful of candidates in the quietly academic atmosphere of a dissertation in a mediaeval university. But as young doctors now enter for it in the same spirit as they back horses in the Grand National, the contest has to be run on sharper lines. The written papers had for once left me reasonably hopeful, and a few days later I was back again in that bleak little upstairs room which is decorated with the particular blend of green and yellow paint so heavily favoured in Britain for mental hospitals, station waiting-rooms, and the surroundings of police courts. Waiting for my oral, I suddenly felt sick of all examinations. I calculated that since childhood I must have sat a dozen of them, including my School Certificate and driving test. As a medical student I had taken them in company with my friends, which gave the ordeal something of the sporting air of a chancy rugger fixture; but now I not only had to face the examiners alone, but I was aware that my next year’s salary depended on it.
    These depressing thoughts seemed to be occurring to the other occupant of the waiting-room, a sad-looking young man with mauve socks who sat staring out of the window in silence until he said suddenly, “If you get old Professor Surridge, you’ll know if you’ve failed.”
    “Will I?” I asked in surprise. “How?”
    “He always asks people he’s decided to plough what the dose of morphine is.”
    “A tough examiner, is he?”
    “On the contrary, he’s very jolly. He’s too kind-hearted to keep chaps in suspense until the results come out. My registrar got through last time – sixth attempt – and was so amazed to find himself outside without being asked the fatal question he put his head back and said ‘It’s an eighth to a third of a grain, sir.’”
    We sat without speaking for a while, pondering what the kindly Professor and his less considerate colleagues were at that moment asking the candidates across the green-baize tables.
    “You from Bart’s?” asked my companion.
    “Swithin’s.”
    “I’m Guy’s. First shot?”
    “Second.”
    “I had a go at the Membership last time.” He was referring to the corresponding examination for prospective physicians. “Damn near passed, too. I thought my long case had a collapsed lung, and I even decided to perform the coin test for good measure.”
    “The coin test? That’s a bit old-fashioned, isn’t it?”
    “Oh, yes, it went out with leeches and gold-headed canes. But some of the examiners are pretty old-fashioned, too. Anyway, in this case it proved a most valuable investigation. I had just produced two half-crowns from my pocket to bang together on the chest – as directed in the textbooks – when the patient stuck out his hand and pocketed them, whispering, ‘Thanks, Guy, it’s a gastric ulcer, actual.’”
    I managed to overcome my surroundings with a laugh. “Didn’t that see you through?”
    “No, worse luck. The next case – the short one – was a heart. Damn it, I diagnosed it perfectly! The patient was sitting up in bed, and I had plenty of time to listen all over his chest. ‘Patent ductus, sir,’ I told the examiner, ‘Quite correct,’ he said. ‘Anything else?’ And I said, ‘No.’”
    This seemed unreasonably unfair. “But why on earth didn’t they pass you?”
    “I hadn’t noticed that some blighter had cut both his bloody legs off as well.” A bell tinkled, and we made for the examination-room door. “I hear they’ve got a bottle with