Walking along the road, the other day (a friend told me), minding his own business, making do with summer-such-as-it-is, he was stopped in his tracks by a brass plate on substantial black railings. The plate read: "Doctor ----, BDS, NUI, Dental Surgeon".
My friend was warming up now. "BDS," he said, "indicates that the man holds a bachelor's degree in dental surgery. Right? And NUI is mere flummery, isn't it? Just three make-weight letters stuck on at the end to set himself a total of six academic letters above the hoi polloi and the tooth-aching public. But how does a man with a bachelor's degree get away with representing himself as having a doctorate?"
"The telephone book is full of them," I said. "The rot set in a long time ago. Pretentiousness is older than the universities, older than history, older than mankind. Watch David Attenborough's documentaries and see how jealously the apes establish rank."
"But the doctor-dentist is a long way from the blacksmith-dentist with his pincers," said my friend. "And the doctor-GP is quite a step away from the bandage wrapped around the barber's pole."
Another friend (this revolt is gathering momentum) says he was lying in Dentist A's chair, waiting for his jaw to freeze, when the telephone rang. The toothsome girl who mixes the filling paste, and dissolves the pink pill in the spitting-tumbler, answers the phone, returns, and says: "It's the [mumble, mumble] company." The dentist chirps: "Tell them, Fiona, that Doctor A will call back when he's free."
Pretentiousness
Oh, the smugness of it! The shameless Θir∅-in-airde of it! The post-colonial galamais∅ocht of it! All this nonsense is copied from the US, where it abounds not only in so-called "real" life but in literature - in John Updike's novels, for instance. Call it vanity, swank, uppishness. Or call it respectability, pretentiousness, putting dogs in windows. It was called "getting notions" when I was a child; and you got your ear pulled for it.
The extent to which "doctor" has been commandeered by the sawbones brigade - and now the dentists - may be seen in a film made by the young Michael Douglas (currently, Mr Catherine Zeta Jones).
US talk shows
Douglas is surrounded by a flutter of purring women, crying, "Oh, you're a dawktah!" He replies: "My doctorate is in mathematics. I'm not a real doctor." Well, hell! In those American talk shows where "prawblems" are discussed, there is always a woman - called "the doctor" - in a red suit and mini-skirt. She used to sit at the end of the line of participants, advising them, cajoling them. (More and more, as the spirit of Jerry Springer invades other shows, she stands behind her victims, hectoring them, brow-beating them, whipping them into a dog-fight). Her opinions are the last word on all problems. To this extent, she outranks the millions-a-year host of the show, just because "the doctor" shares the billing with God in the American Pantheon.
(Interjection: In fairness, I should say that smarter Americans recognise the doctorate industry in the US for what it is. It was one of them who observed that doctoral research amounted to "no more than shifting old bones from one grave to another.")
The GP in the corner house on the suburban road, who is probably a Bachelor of Medicine, is called "Doctor". Indeed, he is thus addressed while still a student "walking the wards". Should he climb the ladder and reach the height at which he specialises and names his own fees, he becomes "Mister" again. Does that not return him to the level at which the rest of mankind abides? No, not at all; in the arcane world of medical snobbery, the designation "Mister" sets him firmly apart from the lowly person who writes prescriptions in the double-fronted corner-house in every suburban estate.
All this brings to mind the unemployed man who hangs about the streets and is humorously designated Inspector of Public Buildings. It is also on a footing with Michael, Inspector of Drains, in the Percy French song. But the cobbler who hangs out a shingle bearing the words "Shoe Surgeon" is a cut above those. With his wax and his ruadh≤g and his heel-ball, he goes about his work "most chirurgeonly," as poor young Hamlet puts it.
The church, too, like children at play, amuses itself at the game of doctor. When a priest becomes a bishop, he is called Dr So-and-so, and the mass media play along with this designation. In some cases, he may have a doctorate; but whether he has or not, he claims, and is accorded, the monniker.
Johnson's thoughts
Boswell asked Johnson - author, we recall, of The Vanity of Human Wishes - for his thoughts on this "doctor" business. He replied: "A Doctor of Medicine is a physician under the protection of the laws, and by the stamp of authority. The physician, who is not a Doctor, usurps a profession, and is authorised only by himself to decide upon health and sickness, and life and death." Of course, matters of authorisation have changed since Johnson's time; but the rot was well advanced then.
In a private letter to Malcolm Cowley, editor of the New Republic, James Thurber put the problem of "the careful, struggling reader" caught up in nonsense rather like that which engages me here. All the reader could do, he felt, was put the whole works down and go out and get cock-eyed at Tim's bar in Manhattan, and ask Tim ("an old Ballyhaunis man," says Thurber) what he thinks of things. "'Tis all balls," says Tim.
All together now: "And so say all of us."