Sir, - The confluence of prejudice and ignorance can have strange results. Kevin Myers's understanding of medical education and its role in producing "a race apart" which produces "a separate caste" who are "brusque, contemptuous, supercilious, arrogant, omniscient . . ." is outdated (An Irishman's Diary, July 14th).
It is true that there are a small number of consultants whose attitudes and behaviour could be so described, but these professional dinosaurs are widely ridiculed in their absence by colleagues. Exalted titles and powerful positions unmask the arrogant, dangerous bully in some people, especially when public accountability is remote. This is a feature of elitist bodies in all professions that only public exposure can counter. I have seen young trainee hospital doctors being bullied but the perpetrators are invariably held in distaste by their colleagues. Labour laws, political correctness and peer pressure has corralled the bullies.
The requirements of medical practice are enormously variable. Endless patience and tolerance in psychiatry and general practice, manual and three-dimensional spatial abilities in surgery, intuitiveness in the physician, good pattern recognition in pathology and radiology and mathematical abilities in public health and all forms of research are all part of the spectrum. In medicine, all human life is there. Liberal arts may be missing but the university of life teaches even the most closeted.
What Kevin Myers got absolutely right is the requirement for factual knowledge. The worldwide investment in medical science is gigantic and the habit of study for doctors is a lifelong necessity. Patients in this country expect and largely receive a standard of care that is world class - good medicine and sometimes great medicine. The public expects and demands a pill for every ill and litigates if dissatisfied. So doctors are under pressure. Publication of morbidity, mortality and outcomes statistics from medical institutions will keep consultants on their toes and prevent a scandal such as occurred in paediatric cardiac surgery at Bristol. However, whistle blowers must be protected and not reviled.
An arts-less person like myself has had to rely on the basics from an erudite teacher such as Pat McDonagh at my old school, Marian College, and decades of reading The Irish Times, the Guardian and other broadsheets. I am doubtless too ill-educated to have real insight into the extent of my ignorance of human nature. However, whether dossing in Earlsfort Terrace in the late 1960s would have been adequate prophylaxis in my case is doubtful. As for doctors as hate figures who are even more reviled than journalists and lawyers, Kevin Myers might be embarrassed if he checks the opinion polls on that subject. - Yours, etc., Dr Bill Tormey,
Glasnevin, Dublin 11.