George's Marvellous Medicine

It’s that time of year. The one when you’re desperately trying to think of present ideas for your nearest and dearest – maybe they’ve given you a few ideas, maybe they have hobby which requires a steady supply of supporting materials, or maybe you’re just doing booze this year. Just possibly you’ve bought yourself a 3D printer, and are desperately shoehorning printed presents into people’s stockings. So that’s how I came to be printing my brother’s skull.

Almost 79 years ago, in the deserts of New Mexico, atoms were torn apart, releasing colossal amounts of energy, and very importantly not igniting the atmosphere causing nuclear armageddon. Can you tell I’ve watched Oppenheimer recently? Politics, ethics, and morality aside, the 16th of July 1945 is a watershed moment in time. However, we may be standing at another brink in human history, and one that may have a reach further than nuclear fission.

The General Medical Council wants doctors to be kind, and when the GMC wants doctors to be something, they add it to their set of standards, Good Clinical Practice. On the face of it, this doesn’t sound like it would be too controversial – who wouldn’t want their doctor to be kind? However, this has engendered a slew of discussion, critique, and in some cases, fear.

Like many an aspiring doctor1, in my youth I undertook the pilgrimage to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. As London’s finest emporium of grisly things in jars, there was always plenty to entertain, and plenty to inflict on the squeamish. After a long-awaited revamp, delayed slightly by COVID, this Mecca of the medically inclined has reopened at last. The museum originated as the private collection of John Hunter, an 18th Century eccentric and surgeon (tautology).

Medical professionals should not be allowed to congregate in public; that’s my stance, and I am sticking to it. When they do, conversation invariably tends gruesome topics such as rotas, frustrating colleagues, and human cannibalism — apologies to the other patrons of La Terra in Bath last Saturday.