THE college I attended had a large teaching hospital attached, so I spent many hours of my youth socializing with medical students. They were an amiable crowd on the whole, though my reverence for the medical profession never quite recovered from the spectacle of half a dozen of Britain’s future neurosurgeons and cardiologists at the Wheatsheaf pub around closing time attempting to belch “God Save the Queen!” in chorus.
Well, I recall a conversation with a medical student who had just completed his final exams and was contemplating further study in some specialized area of medical practice. He was very knowledgeable about all the specialties, about the intraprofessional prestige of each, their various remunerations and opportunities. He was personally attracted towards dermatology-a thing I found surprising, as the prospect of a lifetime spent inspecting other people’s pimples and rashes did not seem to me to be very appealing at all. Ah, he replied with unanswerable logic when I mentioned this, but the dermatologist gets very few night calls.
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