Doctor On The Job Read Free

alarming, of him practising hard-headed medicine.’
    ‘Please see he gets through,’ said the matron, slamming the door.
    Sir Lancelot shook his head slowly, picking his way past the engrossed lunchers towards the lifts. Sometimes even his own ironclad personality came within danger of foundering.

2
    ‘Morning, Solly,’ said Sir Lancelot, passing the St Swithin’s skin specialist in the doorway of the dining-room. ‘I hope you’re encountering no sales resistance among our customers.’
    ‘Some of my best patients are Arabs,’ Dr Cohen told him.
    The medical staff dining-room in the Bertram Bunn Wing was a small, bright apartment on the first floor, overlooking the garden. It was decorated with an allegorical mural depicting Charles Hill of the British Medical Association and Nye Bevan inaugurating the National Health Service in 1948. Both were depicted as Florence Nightingales passing soothingly with their lamps along rows of agonized, frenzied casualties, and nobody could decide if these represented the suffering public or the medical profession. Sir Lancelot always ate with his back to it.
    ‘Hello, Lancelot, what have you been up to?’ asked Sir Lionel Lychfield, the Dean of St Swithin’s Medical School, looking up from The Times as the surgeon sat next to him at one of the square tables.
    ‘The Sheikh of Shatt al Shufti’s bilateral inguinal hernia. I did his hydroceles for an encore. I was going to leave them as shock absorbers for riding his camel, but of course the fellow hasn’t had a rougher ride than a Rolls-Royce for years. I hope he won’t be cross. At home, he punishes thieves by lopping off their hands. And I suppose other offenders by the removal of similarly appropriate parts. I distinctly didn’t like the look of his two bodyguards lurking outside the operating theatre.’
    Sir Lancelot opened the glossy-covered menu. The Bertram Bunn Wing enjoyed the reputation among medical consultants as the best place to eat in London. The food came from the same kitchens as the St Swithin’s National Health patients’, but its own chef toothsomely overcame the challenge of all possible physical states, religious obligations and national or personal tastes. He provided a dozen attractive diets – low calorie, low sodium, high protein, low cholesterol, diabetic, duodenal, vegetarian, kosher, Mohammedan, Cantonese, Pekinese and Indian, as well as his normal cordon bleu . This nourishment being heavily subsidized, the dean ate there whenever he could in preference to the St Swithin’s consultants’ mess. He was famous in the hospital for a purse as tight as an oyster with lockjaw.
    Sir Lancelot asked the young waitress in a green ward orderly’s smock for some cheese sandwiches and a glass of orange juice. The dean ordered entrecôte garni with extra vegetables. ‘The matron’s gone neurotic again, by the way,’ Sir Lancelot told him.
    ‘I do wish she were a more stable sort of female,’ the dean said testily. He was short and skinny, with a pointed bald head and large round glasses beneath straight, bristly black eyebrows. These became agitated in his frequent storms of exasperation, when they always suggested to Sir Lancelot a pair of hairy caterpillars performing a love-dance. ‘But of course, she is highly decorative, as matrons go,’ the dean conceded. ‘And if you’re paying an absolute fortune for your penthouse, you don’t want to be ushered into it by someone with the appearance and attitude of a seaside landlady during a wet August.’
    ‘She’s threatening to go again. But she won’t. She had exactly the same tantrums last January. You may remember, that was when a newly admitted patient, understandably unfamiliar with such complexities of civilization as air-conditioning controls, lit a fire in the middle of his room by chopping up the furniture. She’s also been on about her nephew, Chipps. I suppose if I have to fail him in surgery again tomorrow, he’s for the