Your Life In My Hands--a Junior Doctor's Story by Rachel Clarke

Author:Rachel Clarke [Rachel Clarke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786068194
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2017-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

When it comes to sexism, every group has its outliers, and doctors, like patients, are no exception. Rarely have I encountered overt misogyny among my medical peers, though the few occasions on which I have done so are memorable. Once, just before I sat my finals, an old-school male breast surgeon, close to retirement, gave us a revision lecture on breast cancer. Amid the bleak statistics about the second-biggest cancer killer of women in Britain, he suddenly flashed up a slide of a young blonde woman sitting coquettishly in front of a mammography machine, her naked breasts displayed prominently.

‘Of course,’ the surgeon commented ruefully, ‘most of the patients I see in my clinic are in their fifties at least.’ He paused, eyes twinkling mirthlessly at his student audience. ‘Nothing like as nice as this one is to look at.’

The gasp from the student audience was audible. The sole purpose of the slide appeared to have been to enable the consultant to crack this joke. He continued as though he had said nothing abnormal. Quite apart from the fact that I knew that the mother of at least one of the students in the room was currently receiving treatment for breast cancer, this apparent contempt for women from a man who performed mastectomies for a living was difficult to stomach. To their credit, the medical school leadership took seriously the deluge of complaints that followed and the surgeon in question never taught medical students again.

The old-school are still at large in the medical hierarchy and often, on account of age and seniority, residing near the top of it. Recently, Jen, one of my female junior doctor colleagues, attended a medical dinner at an Oxbridge college. She remarked in passing to her fellow guests that it was striking to observe the low proportion of women seated at the high table. Only two of the forty or so spaces were occupied by women and these, Jen noted, were not present due to academic merit but because they were married to fellows of the college. The implication that medicine might in any way be sexist infuriated Jen’s neighbour, himself a consultant in orthopaedics who led a prestigious department of spinal surgery.

‘The trouble with women in surgery,’ he said, ‘is that they haven’t got the temperament for it. Surgery requires hard work and dedication that women are incapable of. The reason they don’t get to the top is because they’re not cut out for it.’

That such views still exist in Britain’s biggest employer in the twenty-first century struck the surgeon as entirely unremarkable. He was simply stating facts, he argued, and could certainly not be described as sexist himself since he had female juniors working in his service. When challenged with the argument that perhaps attitudes like his own might be driving women away from his speciality, rather than seeking to excel in it, he dismissed this as mere political correctness.

‘There is a temperamental difference between men and women,’ he insisted, ‘that means women do not make good surgeons.

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