There was a time when novels about doctors were popular. There were moving tales and funny stories. Somewhere along the way the stories grew dark and most medical fiction became scary. But, once upon a time, there was the Doctor series by Richard Gordon.
Doctor in the House is his first:
This first book opens with an exam situation.
Every six months this orderly quiet is broken up like a road under a pneumatic drill. Three or four hundred students arrive from every hospital in London and from every medical school in the United Kingdom. Any country that accepts a British qualification is represented. There are brown, bespectacled Indians, invariably swotting until the last minute from Sir Leatherby Tidy's fat and invaluable _Synopsis of Medicine;_ jet-black gentlemen from West Africa standing in nervous groups and testing their new fountain-pens; fat, coffee-coloured Egyptians discussing earnestly in their own language fine points of erudite medicine; hearty Australians, New Zealanders, and South Africans showing no more, anxiety than if they were waiting for a pub to open; the whole diluted thoroughly by a mob of pale, fairly indifferent, untidy-looking British students conversing in accents from the Welsh valleys to Stirlingshire.
Richard Gordon's books have left me memorable giggles and I hope you too will enjoy the amusing stories of life as a doctor.
