Second opinion

WHERE has English courtesy gone?

To India, that's where. I have noticed many times that Indian doctors who come to this country have an old- fashioned English courtliness about them, which is balm to a misanthrope's soul. My present junior, who arrived in England recently, has yet to adopt the coarse and abrupt manners of our age, and was surprised when the nurses urged him to call his patients by their first name, even when they were old enough to be his grandparents.

`What should I do, Dr Dalrymple?' he asked.

`Remember always that you are in the right while they are in the wrong,' I replied. 'Even if you are one and they are many.'

I couldn't honestly recommend, how- ever (and alas), that he continue to address boys as Master Smith and Mas- ter Jones. Apart from anything else, they wouldn't know what he was talking about: they'd wrinkle up their noses and say, 'You what?'

Sometimes I ask my junior doctor a question for the sheer pleasure of listen- ing to his reply. It is like reading Gibbon after having received a circular from the Director of Quality Assurance, Social Services: it reassures you that all is right with the world.

Of course, my junior's not a fool: he has already discovered how degenerate are the former masters of India. His jaw drops at each new instance of their utter degradation, which means that his mouth is open most of the time.

He came to my room last week. He was at a loss to know what to do for one of his patients.

`What's her problem?' I asked.

`She says she needs help. She throws ashtrays at her husband.'

`Is her aim no good?'

He called her into my room. She had a satin dressing-gown and the complexion of a chronic drinker. She wore fluffy slip- pers: always a bad sign.

`I throw ashtrays at him. I can't help it, I don't know what I'm doing.'

`You could injure him severely, or even kill him.'

`It's not my fault, I can't stop myself, I just do it.'

`You mean to say that you're an automaton, a creature with no will of you're own?'

`He's there, I'm here, there's an ashtray on the table, what else do you expect?'

My junior's next patient was a woman with five children, the last two by a man with whom she had now broken, though not for the first time. A year ago, when she had had only one of his children, he had put his hands round her neck to stran- gle her, and she had obtained an injunc- tion against him. But then she returned to him, had a further child by him, and now sought a further injunction against him because of his strangling ways.

`Is he a jealous man?' I asked.

`I've never give him no reason to be.' `I'm not saying that you have. I'm only asking whether he's jealous.'

`I never go out nowhere or meet no one, so he's got no reason to be.'

`But is he jealous all the same? Some men are.'

`I've never had no affairs or nothing, if that's what you mean.'

She left the room. I turned to my junior and told him that she might one day be called to perform jury service. He was astounded.

`You mean. . . ?' he said.

`Yes,' I replied.

`There's no educational test or qualifi- cation?'

`No.'

`You must be joking, Dr Dalrymple, it's simply not possible, I can't believe it. No, no, it's impossible.'

If only we could learn to see ourselves as others saw us.

Theodore Dalrymple