Medical Examinations
My batch mate had joined MBBS with us, but
he took a year longer than we did to finish. He failed to make the grade
several times along the way. It was surprising, the man was intelligent,
articulate and came from a family of doctors. True, he was not very hard
working, and had not come to the realization that you cannot really study
medicine at the last minute, you cannot use crib notes and unless you attend
classes and clinics you are likely to lose your way. (The patient to be diagnosed in the exam is likely to look like a
formidable alien with an out of this world disease).
I had not seen him in several years, and
now he had re-appeared with a good-looking
intelligent daughter in tow. He explained that
she wanted to do medicine and join his alma mater. (Hopefully she was
more hardworking than him).
“I want you to be her local guardian,” he
said, “I don’t want her to make the same mistakes I did.”
He was an eminent surgeon now, and I did
not want to embarrass him in front of his daughter, so I whispered “how did you fail physiology?”
“They gave us a bloody frog. Told us to
kill it ourselves for the practical. They killed the frogs for the girls
though! Had to put a bloody skewer through the base of its brain. It looked
like such a smug idiot sitting there. I
thought I would just give it a little shock before I killed it. Anyway we had
to use electrically stimulate its muscle, that was the experiment. I touched
the wire to its thigh and switched on the amps. It jumped out of the window. “
I said, “didn’t you ask for another frog?”
“I did, but the examiner had seen what I
did. He asked me to leave and gave me zero. There was no hope after that.”
“Okay, but what about pharmacology?”
“I passed but only just. Scraped the bottom
of the barrel. That bloody professor called us all in volunteer for an
experiment. Claimed some of us were going to receive diuretics and others
placebo. Wanted to record effects and side effects. I took the tablets, pissed
like nobody’s business and then passed out. After that I slept for 24 hours.”
That did not sound like an infarction of
the rules to me. “That’s all right. They have to record the side effects
anyway.”
He looked sheepish. “It turned out that I
had received placebo. She almost suggested that I go to the mental health
center for evaluation. I think my reaction skewed her results.”
We had weekly tests in pathology and so
slackers were caught very early on in the semester. He had found a way around
that also. He and a friend studied half the portions each and then copied from
each other during the evaluation. They consistently received pretty much the
same marks and life went on. Then the evaluator wised up and gave one a zero
and the other centum. Instead of leaving well alone, they went together to the
head of the department to fight.
“Its not fair, we copied and I have failed
and he has scored full marks.”
“Aha, “ announced the registrar, “I
wondered what was going on! I am cancelling your entire evaluation. You have to
come in every Saturday and complete the portions”.
Many in the class were annoyed with his
cheating. True, he never aimed for more than 50% and he never tried to get a
prize in the subject, but it was an irritant.
One of the girls went to a restaurant for
lunch on pathology day. She ordered a leg of tandoori chicken. It was enormous
in size and the bird had obviously fractured its leg somewhere along the way.
It had healed but was deformed with a bony bulge mid thigh. After she picked
all the meat off the bone, she carefully washed it and took it back to
pathology class. The tables were carefully set. In the place where he should sit,
she removed the specimen meant for him to identify and kept the chicken leg.
“For once,” he told me, “I was happy. I
knew what the specimen was osteogenesis imperfecta in a child. I usually did not even know which organ it
was!”
I vaguely remembered the sequence of
events. The registrar came in, and he lifted up the chicken leg and went into ecstasies
over the bone. The registrar looked like he was going to throw an apoplectic
fit. “Idiot,” he said, “not only do you eat chicken for lunch, you have the
guts to bring it here and play the fool.”
The daughter was better. She passed with
flying colours and then disappeared into the greener pastures in the USA.
Dr. Gita Mathai
The
writer is a paediatrician with a family practice at Vellore.
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