My prescription for dejected doctors? Stop harking back to a golden age that never was | Clare Gerada

My prescription for dejected doctors? Stop harking back to a golden age that never was | Clare Gerada
Medicine’s a tough career and professionals are demoralised. But the good old days had their dark side too. • Clare Gerada is a former chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners

In the 17th century there was a disease so virulent it was able to wipe out whole armies. Sufferers experienced intense melancholia, anxiety and longing triggered by smell, touch, sight or thought of an object. This disease was nostalgia, described by a medical student and named after nosta for home, and algia for pain. It was prevalent in the Swiss mercenary army, and military physicians postulated it was caused by the unremitting clanging of cowbells in the Alps.

Dormant for centuries, the disease is returning, but this time the afflicted are drawn from a section of the ageing medical establishment. These doctors have developed a delusional system of beliefs that the past was always rosy, that doctors “all knew each other … the firm was a happy band of brothers”, as recalled by Harold Ellis, a surgeon who qualified in 1948. This was a time, they reminisce, where doctors were able to give their patients what they needed: a golden age of medicine, defined by American sociologist Eliot Freidson as the period between 1945 and 1965.

The downside of professional freedom was that only the most incompetent or negligent behaviour led to disciplinary action Continue reading...