Copyright & Information
Doctor in Love
First published in 1957
© Richard Gordon; House of Stratus 1957-2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of Richard Gordon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
www.houseofstratus.com
About the Author
Richard Gordon, real name Dr. Gordon Stanley Ostlere, was born in England on 15 September 1921. He is best-known for his hilarious ‘Doctor’ books. Himself a qualified doctor, he worked as an anaesthetist at the famous St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (where he was also a medical student) and later as a ship’s surgeon, before leaving medical practice in 1952 to take up writing full time. Many of his books are based on his own true experiences in the medical profession and are all told with the wry wit and candid humour that have become his hallmark.
In all, there are eighteen titles in the Doctor Series, with further comic writings in another seven volumes, including ‘Great Medical Disasters’ and ‘Great Medical Mysteries’, plus more serious works concerning the lives of medical practitioners.
He has also published several technical books under his own name, mainly concerned with anaesthetics for both students and patients. Additionally, he has written on gardening, fishing and cricket and was also a regular contributor to Punch magazine. His ‘Private Lives’ series, taking in Dr. Crippen, Jack the Ripper and Florence Nightingale, has been widely acclaimed.
The enormous success of Doctor in the House, first published in the 1950’s, startled its author. It was written whilst he was a surgeon aboard a cargo ship, prior to a spell as an academic anaesthetist at Oxford. His only previous literary experience had been confined to work as an assistant editor of the British Medical Journal. There was, perhaps, a foretaste of things to come whilst working on the Journal as the then editor, finding Gordon somewhat jokey, put him in charge of the obituaries!
The film of Doctor in the House uniquely recovered its production costs whilst still showing at the cinema in London’s West End where it had been premiered. This endeared him to the powerful Rank Organisation who made eight films altogether of his works, which were followed by a then record-breaking TV series, and further stage productions.
Richard Gordon’s books have been translated into twenty languages.
He married a doctor and they had four children, two of whom became house surgeons. He now lives in London.
1
It is a fact well known to the medical profession that doctors marry either nurses, other doctors, or barmaids. During the most marriageable years these are the only women they meet. Indeed, at the age when other young men’s fancies first lightly turn to thoughts of matrimony they are unable to marry at all, being still supported by an allowance from home. It is small consolation to reflect that the further you ascend the evolutionary scale the longer you find the young depend on the parent, which makes medical students the highest form of animal life known to science.
Although my classmates at St Swithin’s Hospital included a couple of harassed young men who arrived at lectures with notebooks dutifully sharing string bags with sprouts and soap-flakes, a married medical student is almost as much an impossibility as a married Boy Scout. Then the magic touch of a diploma changes his emotional life as violently as his economic one. As an unqualified scallywag he has the alternative of dishonourable intentions or no intentions at all; but after the examination results engagement rings sparkle round the nurses’ home as gaily as summer stars, and if the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons knew how many unions were first solemnized by their examiners they would be much alarmed.
The first of my companions to wed was Tony Benskin, who married a night nurse. This was reasonable, as he had once offered matrimony to all of them on duty one night to invalidate an over-enthusiastic proposal to one earlier in the evening. It was almost two years until I saw him again, for medical students at the end of their course, like ships’ passengers at the end of their voyage, exchange addresses with more enthusiasm than earnestness. I ran into him one summer evening in the corridors of St Swithin’s, where I was still working on the junior resident staff.
“Tony!” I cried. I stared at him in alarm. His face was pale and unshaven, his eye wild and bloodshot, his hair and his tie awry. “Tony! What on earth’s the matter?”
“Hello, Richard,” he said absently. “I brought Molly into the hospital last night.”
“Oh, my dear fellow! Was it an accident?”
“Of course it wasn’t an accident! We planned it.”
“You mean… Oh, I see. She’s having a baby?”
“What, you mean you didn’t know?” His tone indicated an affair of universal importance.
“No, I’m afraid the news didn’t reach me. So she’s in the tender care of the midder department? There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Nothing to worry about! What do you understand about it? You’ve never had a baby.”
“But it was a normal pregnancy, I hope?”
“Oh, yes, her pregnancy was normal enough, down to the last molecule of haemoglobin. But just think of the things which might go wrong now! Why, at the best it may be a breech. It could be a persistent occipito-postenor or a transverse lie, or a placenta praevia or a prolapsed cord. She might have a PPH or a Caesar or anything… Do you remember all those frightful pictures in the midder books?” He thrust his hands disconsolately into his trouser pockets. “It’s alarming, isn’t it?”
Seeing that his clinical detachment was as disarranged as his appearance, I laid a hand consolingly on his shoulder.
“Remember all the women who’re having babies every minute of the day. Why, at this very moment Molly will be lying there pleasantly doped with pethidine, listening to old Sister Studholme telling her to bear down nicely, dear, and try and save your pains.”
“But that’s the ruddy trouble!” Tony looked more anxious than ever. “I rushed her in all the way from Hampstead in the middle of the night, and not a thing’s happened since.”
“She’s just gone off the boil, as they say in the midwifery trade.”
“But think what it might be! She could have uterine inertia, deep transverse arrest, contracted pelvis…”
“Look,” I decided. “What you need is a drink.”
He paused. “You know, Richard, I believe you’re absolutely right.”
He calmed a little under the effect of three large whiskies in the King George opposite the Hospital.
“I’m afraid I’m not quite myself,” he apologized.
“But that’s understandable in the circumstances. Traditional, in fact.”
“I’m sorry, Richard. I ought to have slapped you on the back and asked you how you were and talked about the good old days, and so on. But it’s upsetting all this – bringing new life into the world, and so on.”
I laughed. “I’m not sure they shouldn’t have stuck you in the labour ward instead of Molly.”
“It may look funny to you, but it’s a shattering prospect for the first time. Just wait till it’s your turn.”
“Not me! I’m going to stay a bachelor. Changing imperceptibly from gay young to dirty old.”
“Bet you fifty quid you don’t!”
I considered the proposition. “I’ll take you on. It’s a good bet, because I’m determined to get my FRCS before I even think of marrying.” I still wanted to specialize in surgery, and the Fellowship of the Royal College was as essential as a flying licence to a prospective pilot. “And at the present rate I can’t see much chance of passing the exam before I get prostatic hypertrophy and the male menopause.”
“But you’ll have to get married, old man. Take it from me, a doctor’s got to. The patients don’t like you messing about with their wives unless they know you’ve got one of your own at home. Then you must have someone to answer the telephone and open the door and keep all the NHS cards straight and cook the dinner and do the laundry.”
“I could get a housekeeper.”
“The only housekeeper you could possibly employ would have to be so ugly and respectable she wouldn’t bear living with. No, Richard. You’ll have to settle for the pipe and armchair and the slippers and taking the dog for a walk at closing time.”
I took a mouthful of beer thoughtfully.
“But even allowing you’re right, Tony – where do I find the right girl? Supposing I picked the wrong one?”
“Sheer defeatism! Anyway, what’s the matter with one of the matron’s little charges? They’re all healthy girls, they know how to cook and make the beds, and they’re trained to put up with any amount of irritation from crotchety old men. You couldn’t ask for more. It has long been my contention that the most useful function of any nursing school in the country is turning out a supply of fully trained doctors’ wives. Though,” he added reflectively, “they tend to worry a lot about the regularity of your bowels.” Suddenly I noticed his jaw drop. “It’s just occurred to me,” he muttered. “Supposing the poor little thing’s got mixed-up guts or no feet or two heads, or any of those hundreds of congenital defects we had to learn about in embryology?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Tony! Despite the fact that it has you for a father, it will turn out a perfectly healthy and normal baby. The very worst you can worry about is twins.”
He shook his head. “At least it can’t be that – I sent Molly down to the X-ray department long ago. Do you want to see baby’s first photo? I’ve got it in the back of the car.”
The next afternoon I was surprised to see Molly Benskin sitting in the sunshine that pierced the dusty plane trees in the hospital courtyard, still looking like an overripe poppy-head.
“Hello!” I said. “I thought you’d be otherwise engaged.”
She wrinkled her snub nose. “It’s all Tony’s fault. Instead of acting in a perfectly calm and professional manner as he would if I was his patient instead of his wife–”
“He’s been behaving like any other expectant father?”
“Oh, much worse! Do you know, for the last month he’s been trying to take my blood pressure pretty well hourly? And every time I had a backache he got the car out. In the end I couldn’t stop him rushing me here at four in the morning as though I was on fire. I think he was scared stiff he’d have to deliver it himself.”
“As far as I remember, Tony was never very accurate at midder,” I told her sympathetically. “When I was a student with him we always seemed to arrive either three hours too early or five minutes too late.”
“Now I’ve got to stay in the ward, I haven’t got any of my things, my hair’s terrible, I look most unglamorous, the food’s uneatable, sister’s a bitch, and I’m fed up.” She pouted. “On top of that, I feel that I’m never going to have the poor little thing at all.”
“Don’t you worry, Molly. So do all expectant mothers. It’s never been known to fail yet.”
Two days afterwards she was delivered of an eight-pound baby boy, which Tony Benskin later carried through the main gate of the hospital with the expression of one who had discovered and patented the process himself. Helping them into the car, I was surprised to find that even I experienced strong avuncular feelings. Marriage, I had always felt, was some sort of disease which creeps up on everyone with age, like hardening of the arteries. For the first time I began to wonder how long my immunity would last.
2
The following morning I woke in my bare room in the St Swithin’s resident staff quarters feeling like Sisera, who I remembered learning in Divinity had a tent-peg driven through his temple while he slept. The old diagnosis would have been hangover vulgaris; but now that my former classmates were scattering both geographically and professionally I rarely had anyone to go drinking with, and I had gone to bed at eleven after a cup of coffee with the night nurse down in casualty.
In the gloomy residents’ dining-room, sitting beneath the chiding eyes of Hippocrates, Lord Lister, and Sir William Osler, I found that I couldn’t eat my breakfast This was unusual, because after even our most shameful student debauches I was always ready for my porridge and kippers as usual the next morning. I managed to swallow a cup of tea, then put on my white coat and crossed the hospital courtyard to my laboratory.
At the time I was coming to the end of my appointment as the junior resident pathologist I spent my days in the pathology block, sitting at a bench richly engrained with the brilliant blues, greens, and reds used for staining bacteria, doing calculations and tests on “specimens”. These were of various sorts, and either sent across daily from the wards by the trayful or borne to us proudly by out-patients in a selection of jam-jars and beer bottles produced from inside the jacket or shopping basket.
“Do you mind if we have the window closed?” I asked the junior pathology demonstrator, my overseer. I pulled a high wooden laboratory stool to my usual place. “It’s a bit nippy this morning.”
“Nippy? It’s a lovely hot summer’s day!”
I drew my microscope towards me and shivered.
“Be a good lad and get on with this pile of blood counts,” he continued. “There’s been a rush of them over from the wards. Then there’s some urines over there I’d like you to tackle when you’re free. They’re beginning to niff a bit.”
When the demonstrator went off to lecture I shut all the windows. Then I was surprised to find that the weather had suddenly turned warmer and I was sweating. The climate was particularly irritating, because that morning my work was twice as troublesome as usual. I had difficulty in focusing the microscope, I kept shaking drops of blood from the little glass sides, and I couldn’t add up. By lunch time I slunk back to my room and laid down, wondering why I felt so tired.
It didn’t occur to me that I was ill. It never does to doctors, who are as shocked to find themselves sick as a policeman to discover that his home has been burgled or a fireman to see his own roof on fire. It was almost through curiosity that I rummaged for a clinical thermometer I kept somewhere in my sock drawer, and slipped it under my tongue.
“Good God!” I said. I had a temperature of a hundred and three.
I sat down on the edge of my bed, faced with the unnerving problem of self-diagnosis.
I gingerly felt my pulse. Ninety-six. Crossing to the mirror I stuck out my tongue, which looked like the inside of an old kettle. I stared down my throat, but found I couldn’t see very far. Opening my shirt, I ran a stethoscope over as much of my chest as possible, and discovered that listening to your own breath-sounds for the first time is as alarming as hearing a record of your own voice. After thinking for a few minutes I decided that it must be typhoid fever.
Another characteristic of doctors is never allowing themselves to be ill by half-measures. In the process of self-diagnosis they think first of all the fatal diseases, next of the most outlandish, thirdly of the most uncomfortable, and finally reach a decision which would have had them thrown out of any qualifying examination in the country. Failing typhoid, I suspected glanders, psittacosis, or incipient cholera, and remembering the light-hearted way in which we manipulated dangerous bacteria in the laboratory I threw in rabies and plague as well.
After diagnosis comes treatment, and fumbling in my shaving locker for some white tablets which I thought were aspirins I swallowed a few. A further peculiarity of the physician healing himself is a wild disregard for labels and dosage: men who terrify patients by repeating sternly “Not more than two teaspoonsful after food” treat their own complaints largely with the pharmaceutical samples sent from drug manufacturers, in doses of either a moderate handful or a large swig. Feeling afterwards that I should call for professional advice, I picked up my bedside telephone and rang my friend Grimsdyke, who was working as a resident anaesthetist in the operating theatre.
“I’m ill,” I told him, describing my symptoms. “What do you think I should do?”
“Go and see a doctor.”
“Look here, this isn’t a laughing matter. I feel terrible.”
“Seriously, old lad. Get one of the house physicians. I don’t know much more about pure medicine than I do about pure mathematics. We live in an age of specialization, don’t we? Must get back to the theatre now – Patient looks a bit blue.”
I then rang Hinxman, houseman to Dr Pennyworth, the St Swithin’s senior physician.
“You’ve probably got the measles,” he said cheerfully on the other end of the line. “There’s a lot of it about at the moment.”
“I’ve had it. A most nasty attack when I was six.”
“It’s quite possible to get it twice, of course. And it’s usually much worse the second time. Or it might be mumps. You know what that leads to, don’t you?” He roared with laughter: fellow-doctors show as little sympathy for each other in trouble as fellow-golfers. “It’s a bit of a nuisance, because we’ve hardly got a spare bed in the ward. But I’ll pop along and see you when I’ve got a moment.”
Hinxman appeared an hour or so later. He was a red-faced, curly-headed young man much given to tweeds and pipes, who always entered a room as though coming from a brisk tramp across open moors on a gusty day. I found his aggressive healthiness deeply depressing as I nervously watched his broad pink hands pummel my abdomen.
“Deep breath, old man,” he commanded. He frowned.
For the first time I realized how alarming a doctor sounds when he goes “M’m”.
“Think I can get a touch of the spleen there,” he added.
“Good Lord!” I jumped up. “It might be one of those horrible leukaemias.”
“Yes, and it may be the chlorotic anaemia of young virgins. Don’t get excited about it. I haven’t felt a spleen for weeks, anyway, and I’m probably wrong. I’ll get old Pennyboy along when he looks into the hospital at six. Meanwhile, go to bed.”
“Bed?” I protested. “But I don’t really want to go to bed. I hate lying down doing nothing.”
“My dear chap, you must. The first thing any physician does is to put his victim to bed and tell him to keep quiet. It doesn’t do the patient the slightest harm, and it gives everyone time to think. Why, we’ve had some of our patients in bed for weeks upstairs while we’ve been thinking. We’re not like surgeons, you know – never happy unless they’re doing something violent.”
Dr Pennyworth himself came to my room that evening, followed by Hinxman and his medical registrar. The hospital’s senior physician was a small, thin, pale man with two tufts of grey hair jutting over his ears, dressed in a black jacket and pin-striped trousers. He was so quiet and so modest that he seemed to enter the room like a ghost, without using the door. He stood by my bedside, softly wished me good evening, perched a pair of rimless pince-nez on his nose, and inspected me through them in silence.
“Ever been in India?” he asked mysteriously.
“No, sir.”
“H’m.”
After some moments’ thought gently took my hand and stood staring at my nails. This I recognized as the manner of a true physician: a surgeon would have burst into the room, pummelled me briskly, exclaimed “Does it hurt? Where? There? Don’t worry, old fellow, we’ll have it out!” and telephoned the operating theatre. Dr Pennyworth silently listened to my chest, scratched the soles of my feet, pulled down an eyelid, shook me by the hand, and after a whispered discussion with his assistants disappeared as softly as he came.
As no one had told me what was wrong, I lay staring at the ceiling and speculating on the further possibility of malaria, cerebral abscess, and spirochoetsis ictero-haemorrhagic. I had almost given myself up for lost by the time Hinxman reappeared.
“You’re to be warded, old man,” he announced cheerfully. “I’ve fixed everything up. Just slip on a dressing-gown and wander up to Honesty when you feel like it. Try not to breathe on too many people on the way, won’t you?”
“But what have I got?”
“Oh, didn’t we tell you? Look at your eyeballs.”
“Good Lord!” I exclaimed, turning to the mirror. “Jaundice.”
“Yes, you’d pass for a good-looking Chinaman anywhere. I’ll come and see you later. By the way, we’ll be needing a contribution for your own laboratory.”
Collecting my toothbrush, I obediently left the residency for the main hospital block and made my way upstairs to Honesty Ward. I had rarely been ill before, and I had never been in a ward in a subjective capacity at all. I now approached the experience with the feeling of a judge mounting the steps to his own dock.
“Well, well, fancy seeing you,” said the staff nurse, a motherly blonde I had once met at a hospital dance. “Sister’s off, so I’ve put you in the corner. You’re not terribly infectious, and we’ll have you on barrier nursing.”
I got into the white iron bed, which was ready with hot-water bottle in knitted cover, red rubber sheet next to the mattress, back-rest, air-ring, and a small enamel bowl on the locker in case I wanted to put my teeth in it.
“Sorry we can’t have you in a side-room,” she apologized. “But they’re both in use. One might be free in a few days,” she added significantly, “and you can move in then.”
My first few days as a patient were delightful. My disease wasn’t serious – though I kept remembering the nasty phrase in one of my textbooks, “a small percentage of cases are fatal” – and it had the advantage that no treatment whatever was known to medical science. This left my days and nights undisturbed by having to swallow oversized pills or having to tolerate over-used needles. All I had to do was lie on my back and get better.
But I soon realized that being ill in a modern hospital is far from a passive process. A few years ago it dawned on physicians that patients shouldn’t be allowed simply to rot in bed, but should be provided with daily exercise for both body and mind. This idea is now applied so enthusiastically and ward routine has become so strenuous that only people of a basically sound constitution can stand it.
Our day, like the Army’s, started at six-thirty with a wash in tepid water, and continued almost without a break until lights-out at nine. Apart from the regular upheavals caused by bed making, meals, hot drinks, blanket baths, temperature-taking, visits by the doctors, and the distribution of “bottles”, there always seemed to be some hospital functionary waiting to see you. Each morning there appeared a blonde girl looking like a Wimbledon champion in a white overall, who came from the Physiotherapy Department to conduct a horizontal PT class. When we had flexed our knees and twiddled our toes in unison under the bedclothes, another girl arrived from the Occupational Therapy Unit with a basket of felt scraps for making pink bunnies. Afterwards came the hospital librarian to see if you felt like reading, the hospital dietitian to see if you felt like eating, and the hospital chaplain to see if you felt like death. Next appeared the man who brought the post, the boy who sold the newspapers, and several women with brooms who swept under the beds and carried on a loud conversation between themselves about everyone’s illnesses. If you still had time, you could explore the arid stretches of the morning and afternoon radio programmes through the headphones, or swap symptoms with your neighbour. There was a welcome period of enforced sleep after lunch, but this was generally disturbed by fifty students clattering in for a ward-round or one of the medical staff appearing to examine you to test some private theory. Later, those of us allowed up sat round the empty fireplace stroking the ward cat, smoking our pipes, and exchanging opinions in a tranquilly companionable atmosphere reminiscent of an old men’s home.
It was in these circumstances that I first fell seriously in love.
