These notes are yet to be made into a proper tutorial

 

p8 being a doctor’s son, never contemplating another career.

p10 bottom para ‘The Hospital’ public attitude to St Swithins

p12 OT’s...pt’s imprisoned on wards, staff:patient ratio 4:1

p14 wanted to be a doctor because he couldn’t think of anything else…Consider consequences of this for medical care?

Ch 2 A mocking but amusing intro to the dingy world of the medical school (reminds me of Melb Uni open day as a schoolboy) founded by the richest brewer in London, across the road is the St George pub Consider humourous association with alcohol and medical life…drunkards are amusing old fellows

p25 the padre at the Chapel (ie the pub)

p27 ‘you will learn enough bad habits to make life bearable’

p28 his car is called The Ulcer, because it is always breaking down.

p30-1 Consider how do we view the forced enema with Guiness Stout today?

p34-5 The anatomy room and the professor…very funny

p42 Always disinclined to spend on mere food and shelter money that would do equally well for beer and tobacco.

p46 (the book knowledge) was ours for the taking…jokey myth about not studying

p54-5 Inevitably they meet their first nursing sister…sex roles are black and white…Sr Virtue, who cauterises them with her eyes…her first greeting a hissed ‘Get out!’

p60 the typical physician, pleased to score a diagnosis before the post-mortem

p64 Sir Lancelot Spratt, the surgeon, and his suit cut with considerably greater skill than his incisions

p73 During the following three months I learnt a little about surgery and a lot about surgeons

p74 The more he did to them, the greater the complications that resulted from his interference, the larger the number of supplementary operations he had to perform to retrieve his errors, the more they thanked him: there was never one but died grateful.

p82 Spratt refuses surgery and leaves to die in peace in the country

Ch8 Nurse’s home: strict rules. Consider Their persistence, why? Who was kept from you. p84 Uninhibited lechery of two-weekly passes

p87 Nursing is no vocation; they all come to get a rich husband

p88 and how many enter medicine through feelings of humanity

Ch 10 squib at medical research p112

p113 Sr Prudence…lovely comic cameo and humanism..p114…that underlies Gordon’s writing

p115 the power of drama and community at the hospital muck up

p136-7 good piece on the headache…Consider why doesn’t the patient go straight to the psychiatrist? What do doctors fear?

 

P142-3 the professors life…another nice comic cameo

154 the by now old observations on a career in dermatology

p162 ‘We all agreed that it was unnecessary to equip ourselves with a knowledge of the most frequent serious illnesses we would come across in practice.’

 

References and Further Reading

 

Gordon R (1952) Doctor in the House (28^th Impression) Michael Joseph, London