The Stethoscope

Through The Wrong End Of The Stethoscope

The perennial interest of a majority of people in their own and others’ innards is the foundation on which numerous novelists have built modest fortunes.

Using the technical language of the profession, stuffing them as full of clinical details as the layman can absorb, presenting the characters as so human, yet paradoxically god-like, these novels do a good public relations job in their build-up of the medical profession. To such an extent that it comes as a jolt when you look up from the pages to reflect that most of the GP’s you have met on a journey through life, are about as god-like as plumbers. No more and no less.

The Americans go in for the fanciest medical novels and The Interns, by Richard Frede, follows a well-worn tradition.

An intern, according to the American dictionary, is an apprentice doctor, who, having graduated from a licence to practise medicine. , Those we are concerned with here were interned” in the New North Hospital and divide their time between acting like child delinquents

and acting like junior geniuses,

According to this book it is a mixed-up period of too little cash, too much work; fear that (a) you can’t make the grade or (b) that you are cleverer than the real doctors, A period of being tortured by the uncertainty of the future, and frustrated by a sex-life that is a matter of fleeting moments in de serted operating theatres or cloak room cupboards, In short, and in one way and another, it is clear that internship is sheer hell and the wonder of it is that America manages to produce so many normal and efficient doctors'— and that the survival rate in US hos- Pi* als * sf ?' o P d l t ° „ no "% . , hi „„ .

In the clm.cal department this novel C ?P. . ®‘ v f. - OLI cancers, abortions, f, Po s Fg rad uate course and has all the hall marks of being as popular as

Morton Thompson’s best selling

j^ ot s a stranger. (THE interns. Published by Wm.

Heinemann Ltd. 22/6.)