At the completion of three pre-clinical years of Medical School, medical students were left with only the mickey-mouse ordeal of Social and Preventative Medicine before being let loose in a Teaching Hospital, where the sick and wounded and their pretty nurses were at our mercy.
But before we were granted leave to kneel at the feet of the gods of medicine, surgery and obsterics, we had to tolerate the indugence of the Dean of Medicine and his pretend job as Professor of Social and Preventive Medicine.
Social and Preventive Medicine involved an interview with the Dean, an ex-Church of England Grammar School student. That I should even know that says it all.
The Dean was pleased to inform me that, because he considered me too deferential, I was unsuited to a career in Medicine.
(Fortunately his opinion wasn't sought by the Clinical Professors.)
His contribution to our medical education was an escorted tours of the city's sewerage treatment works, water supply and (for reasons I am still unable to understand) a disused underground coal mine.
(The highlight of the coal mine tour was, for me, climbing up the long steel ladder out of the mine behind the prettiest girl in our year, who was wearing a minnie skirt).
The Dean had driven the ex-Church of England Grammar School boys in his own vehicle.
The rest of us had to find our own way there, and weren't invited to beers with them at a pub on the way home.
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