Abstract
From 1st August 1974 I worked as a Pre-registration House Officer in a Scottish hospital whose routine business was general and respiratory medicine, and infectious disease. Like my contemporaries, I quickly settled into the alternate nights and weekends on call, the weekends starting at 8 a.m. on Friday, and although the hospital returned to normal at 8 a.m. on Monday, it would likely be 5–6 p.m. before the on-call resident could leave. We also did a lot of our own emergency lab work—haemoglobins, total and differential white cell counts in blood and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), and staining urine, CSF and sputum with Gram’s and Ziehl–Neilsen’s stain. An alarm bell would periodically ring to remind us to check the ESRs set up an hour earlier. We cheerfully grumbled, our consultants would nod sympathetically, then point out that our conditions were positively Elysian, compared to what they had endured when at our...
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