Margaret McCartney: Medicine is a bit of a giggle

Medicine is serious, pressurised, and stressful; it deals with death, life, ethics, human suffering, tragedy, hard statistics, and the Krebs cycle. It’s also a bit of a giggle.

I can hardly tell of the truly funny things that have happened in the consulting room, what with confidentiality and all. But some things get repeated often enough to be at least partly, and probably totally, mythical.

Take, for example, the GP on a house call whose patient complained of her washing machine being broken. Bemused, the doctor fixed the leaky connection, only to find later that he had called at the wrong house and that the “patient” had assumed he was an engineer.

Or the one about …