My first experience of ward rounds was as a first year clinical student in 1950. The professorial parade occurred on two afternoons a week, and, with the professor's known wartime naval career, there was a background of naval terminology, such as the ward being unofficially known as the quarterdeck. The professor's retinue of assistants, lecturers, house surgeons, and many others was so large that, by the time he had reached the second bed in the clockwise circuit of the Nightingale ward, the last of us were still coming in through the ward doors. After that the ward …