Not so Commonplace

October 30, 2024 by Doctor Vernon Coleman

The following short articles are taken from Vernon Coleman’s Commonplace Book – which can be purchased via the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com

General Practice in the UK
After being diagnosed with breast cancer, Antoinette telephoned our GP’s surgery to make an appointment. To my astonishment (and horror) Antoinette was told that she couldn’t have an appointment to see her GP for three weeks or more. Antoinette explained that she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer and that for much of August she would be at the hospital every day for radiotherapy. The receptionist was adamant. The best she could do was to arrange for the GP to telephone her the following week.

On another occasion, not long after her diagnosis, Antoinette had a call from the GPs’ surgery. A receptionist told Antoinette that one of the GPs wanted to speak to her on the telephone. She was told that an appointment has been made for the GP to ring her in eight days’ time. She was told that her GP, who has received a letter from the hospital, would ring her then and tell her something, possibly to her disadvantage. We had no idea what the call would be about or what the something might be. We were so accustomed to waiting for news that eight days seemed a perfectly reasonable period of time to wait to receive a telephone call.

I like to think that I am a gentle, forgiving sort of person but if I had my way these people would be boiled in oil, hung drawn and quartered, dragged through the streets, beheaded and burnt alive. Is that unreasonable?


Autry
I doubt if many people remember Gene Autry. The few who do, probably know him only as ‘the singing cowboy’. But Autry was much, much more than a successful star of over 50 westerns. Songs he made famous include ‘Frosty the Snowman’, ‘Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer’, ‘You are my sunshine’, ‘Blueberry Hill’ and ‘Home on the Range’. He wrote many popular songs which are still regularly recorded and performed – including the evergreen ‘Here comes Santa Claus’. He had a long running hit radio show (Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch) and when television began he started a (long running) TV show (The Gene Autry Show). His horse Champion had his own radio show. When he died (aged 91 in 1998) Autry was worth an estimated $320 million. His estate must still be earning millions.


Flyer
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the French author and aviator, wrote several wonderful books about flying (the best of which is Wind Sand and Stars) but is most famous for having written The Little Prince (published posthumously in France) which has been translated into 250 languages and is one of the top selling books in the world, though, of course, Saint-Exupery never knew any of this. On July 31st 1944, Saint-Exupery, then 44-years-old, took off from the Island of Corsica flying a Lockheed Lightning P38 reconnaissance plane. His task was to collect intelligence on German troop movements in and around the Rhone Valley. He never returned and his disappearance remained a mystery for years. There were theories that he had lost control of his aeroplane or that he had deliberately committed suicide by flying into the sea. (Saint-Exupery had been wrongly said to have been a supporter of the Vichy Regime in France and as a result of the libel, he had become depressed and was drinking heavily.) In 1998, divers finally found the damaged remains of his plane after a fisherman found a bracelet with Saint-Exupery’s name engraved on it. Further lengthy investigations suggested that the plane had been shot down by a German pilot called Horst Rippert. ‘I shot down Saint-Exupery,’ said Rippert in 2008. The ultimate, tragic irony is that Rippert had read a number of Saint-Exupery’s books and was a huge fan. ‘If I had known what I was doing I would never have done it,’ he is reported to have said, riddled with shame and guilt at having killed his hero. There is a small bust of Saint-Exupery in a tiny park near to Les Invalides in Paris.


Origins
‘Consider your origin. You were not formed to live like brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.’ – Dante Alighieri


Perk
I’ve never really had any perks because I’ve never really had a job. But when I was a medical student, the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham used to allow staff (and students) to eat free in the canteen after midnight. Impoverished students ate most of their hot meals after midnight. That was a perk worth having and provided a welcome change from pie and chips (we couldn’t afford fish) or Chinese takeaway meals.


Advice
Here are three pieces of advice which all GPs would do well to remember. First, when a mother says that her child is ill then the child is almost certainly ill. Mothers know best and often know better than doctors. Indeed, this is pretty well true for patients of all ages. I made it a rule always to visit patients at home, whatever time of day or night, if they or a relative wanted to see a doctor. If I talked to a patient on the telephone I would always end the consultation by asking if they wanted me to visit. Most of the time they said no, it wasn’t necessary. And I always told them that if things changed, or they were worried, they should ring back. Next, doctors should visit frail and elderly patients at home once every two weeks. These days, of course, the vast majority of doctors never see patients in their own homes. Doctors who do not visit their patients at home are failing themselves and their patients.


Book Sales
Excluding The Bible (which is estimated to have sold five billion copies), the Qur’an, the Book of Mormon and other religious books, the top selling books in the world (the top seven of which have each sold over 100 million copies) are:
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – J.K.Rowling
And Then There Were None – Agatha Christie
Dream of the Red Chamber – Cao Xueqin
The Hobbit – J.R.R.Tolkein
She: A History of Adventure – H.Rider Haggard
The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D.Salinger
The biggest selling non-fiction book which isn’t a religious volume has for many years been ‘The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care’ by Benjamin Spock, which is estimated to have sold 50 million copies worldwide since its first publication in 1946.


NOTE
The short articles above were all taken from Vernon Coleman’s Commonplace Book – which has just been published and can be purchased via the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com

Copyright Vernon Coleman October 2024