Liverpool opinions
Doctor Yes - Good doctors are the norm
By John
Williams
In the immortal words of the late and much lamented Jim Morrison,
"Nobody gets out of this place alive!"
In the meantime we are subject to illness in every phase of our lives, and so our reliance on the good offices of physicians is almost total. When I see the likes of Dr. Harold Shipman and Mr. Ledward I realise how lucky I have been in my relationships with doctors.
For thirty-two years I was a patient of one of the nicest human beings I ever met. His name was Leonard Wolfman, and he had a shop front practise in Lodge lane, an area of Liverpool which, after being ravaged in the Toxteth riots of the 80's, is now almost totally neglected and doesn't even boast many shop fronts much less a surgery.
Nothing ruffled Lennie. You could present with almost any kind of medical problem and he would simply take a few puffs on his pipe, shake out your notes onto the desk and then fix you with a level bespectacled gaze before offering his diagnosis. On reflection I suspect that his pipe smoking and paper shuffling rituals were his way of clearing his mind of his anxieties about his patients.
The tribulations of the Congolese people in the sixties created shock waves the world over, and my mother was especially distressed by the plight of the children. She became so distraught that my step-father had to send for Lennie.
The good doctor arrived promptly, there was no such thing as a waiting list or a locum service where he was concerned. Unflappable as ever he talked to my mother at some length and then, pulling on his pipe, delivered his prognosis,
" Either stop watching these television pictures or you will become too ill to do anything useful for those kids."
My mother stopped watching the images of starvation that were broadcast daily, and she regained her peace of mind, and was thus able to raise her new born son, who was later able to make his own useful contribution to the world.
I sometimes wonder how much of daily T.V. images of horror our children absorb as they affect to be interested in their Playstations or Lego. It seems every generation has its Belsen, Biafra or Bosnia to contend with.
Some might argue that Dr. Wolfman's prescription was simplistic or even impractical, but it prevented my mother from developing an immunity toward human agony, a condition we now call compassion fatigue. Lennie looked after me until the day he retired and on that day I felt as though I had lost a family member. So you can imagine my sense of dismay when I read of the depredations of Mr Ledward, a gynaecologist nicknamed 'the butcher', whose treatment of his female patients on verges on crimes against humanity.
Amid the mass of media comment about the so-called doctor one thing struck me forcibly. He had often boasted that he was the fastest gynaecologist in the region. Now, if there was ever a better description of a cowboy I have never seen it.
More chilling though is the fact that the only other clinician in history to brag of his speed in depriving human beings of their reproductive organs was a certain Dr Mengele. Mengele, the 'Angel of death', regularly set himself the target of sterilising as many victims in the space of an hour as he could, without benefit of anaesthetic. I wonder if Mr. Ledward only anaesthetised his victims because the law demands that a qualified anaesthetist is present during major surgery.
So when I see the hysteria whipped up by the media , concerning the fitness of our nation's doctors, who cite as 'evidence' of declining standards of care the activities of messrs Shipman and Ledward*, I just remember Dr. Leonard Wolfman.
He once drove me to hospital in his own car because he wanted me to be examined by cardiac specialists immediately and wasn't prepared to wait for an ambulance. As it happened, it was a false alarm, except to the good doctor, because to him an alarm was neither real nor false. It was just another cause for concern, a trait he possessed in abundance.