Old school

I had a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon sitting in with a visiting specialist.  He's a geriatrician, meaning he deals with old folks.  So my eyebrows twitched when the second patient walked in and she was 22.  After that patient left I said to him, "If I may ask a stupid question, aren't you a geriatrician?", and he laughed at me and explained that he also works as a general physician, so he also gets to deal with all the "what the heck is going on here?" patients.

Anyway, the reason it was a lovely afternoon isn't because I learned a lot (I learned a little bit) but because he was a very chatty guy and we spent a long time talking between patients.  We talked about amateur radio equipment and licensing (he's an enthusiast, I'm an engineer), the cultural differences between "my" university hospital and "his" guys across town, I explained wargames to him, he talked about how much medicine has changed since he started back in the Paleolithic era when they didn't even know that you weren't supposed to eat rocks and so on. 

Despite our good chats, when he asked me, "So what textbooks do you use?", there was no way I was going to say, "Wikipedia", since up to that point we were getting on well.  So I quickly listed the names of some of the textbooks that I saw on the shelf that time I went into the library to see if there was a toilet in there (there isn't), and he seemed happy with that.  Fortunately it went on to a conversation about the different ways that you can use books and I was able to explain my pet theory that a book is useful either for learning from or as a reference text but never both, and he was gracious enough to agree with me.

He even tried to convince me to do my internship across town with the opposition.  I was expecting him to try to argue that the training is better, it's more rigorous, and all that competitive blather.  But his argument was that it's the biggest hospital so it's a great way to meet girls.  I assume he hadn't noticed the wedding ring on my finger, or else thought that someone as devastatingly handsome as me must be a caddish bounder and I thus require a steady stream of women to sate my flawed ego.  Because that's what people always think.

A few weeks back, a different doctor told me about how on his first day of med school he walked up to a big group of fellow students and introduced himself, and they told him to "fuck off" because he wasn't from their very special and privileged old school.  And today this nice geriatrician was telling me how 17 boys from his class got into medicine because they got such a great education at their very special and privileged old school.  Presumably he's mellowed since the Paleolithic era...