In this fourth book of his recollections, Leslie Poidevin calls himself lucky because of his wife, ‘R.M.’ His medical career begins when his father, a doctor, dies on the night of his first leaving certificate (HSC) exam, and the Medical Benevolent Society helps him into the University of Sydney in 1932.  

The best parts of The Lucky Doctor concern student days, and time as a POW (Prisoner of War) in East Timor then Indonesia under the Japanese in WWII. However, there is a separate book about the war entitled ‘Samurais and Circumcisions’ (In Chifley library D811.P65 1985). At the end of his life his anger at the human rights abuses in Timor surfaces as a hatred for the Japanese that his training as a physician cannot contain. 

Like McCann, the first auto-biographer we looked at, Poidevin enjoyed dissection. There being a black market run by a dissecting room attendant, he was able to purchase an arm to work on at home. When the scheme was exposed, he panicked and stuffed his arm behind a locker. He claims he never returned for it! On another occasion a student found a penis in her handbag, but retaliated by stuffing it into the carburettor of the perpetrator’s new car (No need to try these tricks at home). 

Poidevin also acquired the vices of smoking and nail-biting, and tells of his anxiety at the possibility of failure in final year. He lost weight, taking Fisher’s Phosphorine, an arsenical and strychnine type tonic highly regarded for ‘nerves’; and he was anxious to the point of vomiting over his Haematology viva. 

In his description of a ward round with HH Schlink, a senior honorary in O&G, he recreates a bedside manner that is hopefully becoming a thing of the past:  

“How long have you been bleeding?”

“Well doctor when Gran was staying with us at Easter…”

“I didn’t ask who was staying with you. How long have you been bleeding?”

“I’m not sure, doctor.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake get a proper history from this stupid woman. I’ll see the next patient.”  (p53) 

Consider: What is going on in this dialogue? Who is failing to say what, and why? Have you noticed any examples of failed communication between doctor and patient that you can make some general observations about in your PPD journal?

 

Poidevin is next found with his colleagues sniffing ethyl chloride as 1939 grinds on and World War 2 becomes inevitable. In my reading of his text, his anxiety partly manifests itself as a passion for surgery. He talks of doing others’ call, of being almost unbalanced in his enthusiasm. When war breaks out he notes that nurses were ‘straining at the bit’ to get into the services, and he was in a quandary as to his own best course of action.

After a period of general practice in Scone, in 1941 he joins ‘Sparrow Force’ for East Timor, in Darwin, with the 2/12^th Field Ambulance. Reinforcements were held back as 22,000 Japanese invaded…and all 2,000 Allied were captured or killed, and their 100 bed hospital and staff seized. 

Clearly the war gave Poidevin nightmares for many years, but he focuses on the excellent opportunity to hone his surgical skills. In the POW camps for three years he keeps psychologically healthy by keeping busy: becoming surgeon to British (captive) forces in Java, and running a private practice in circumcision for the Japanese- to whom the operation was like getting a free ‘master card at a brothel’. Being a POW was his greatest lesson in life. 

Consider: Personally, I hope never to become embroiled in somebody else’s armed conflict. What about you? What would you do, for examples, if your government called you up, or the enemy kidnapped you and forced you to work on their wounded? 

Later in the book Poidevin calls the specialist consultants of Adelaide’s North Terrace ‘Jack Russells’, but goes on to laud the system of commercial competition for patients, acquired through honorary positions at hospitals and private contacts, that perhaps created those personalities he was affronted by. He also denounces tie-less academics and the Whitlam Medicare program. 

Consider: This doctor makes a number of asides about stress in his younger days and the medications he tries to combat it. If this is a problem for you at any time in your career, talk to someone about it, instead of suffering until it is time to write your memoirs! 

References and Further Reading 

Poidevin L (1988) The Lucky Doctor  Self-Published ISBN 0 9588361 2 4 

NB: curiosity…Rabelais pp468, 476 Poidevin mentioned as red-faced Picts