The lonely doctor

Text 1: A Night Call on the Moor, by Samuel Rook

An original journal written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

December 3rd. Called at one in the morning to a farm at Hagg End, eleven miles across the moor, where a woman was two days in labour. The boy who brought the message had run the whole way and could hardly stand. I rode out in sleet with a lantern tied to the saddle, and twice lost the track entirely, and once the mare went to her knees in a drift and I thought we should both lie there until the spring.

I reached the farm a little before four. It was a hard case. There is no other medical man within twenty miles, and so there was no one to send for, no one to consult, no one to share the decision with when I saw that I must use the instruments or lose them both. That is the part of this work that a town physician never knows. In a town, if a case goes wrong, three colleagues will have stood at the bedside. Here, it is my judgement, my hands and my lantern, and afterwards my conscience, alone.

Mother and child are both living. The farmer, a silent man, pressed my hand and would not let it go, and his wife’s mother gave me hot milk with something stronger in it, and put my wet coat to the fire. I rode home in a clear dawn with the moor white for miles, and I confess I sang. People in the town pity me for burying myself out here, as they put it. They do not know that there is not a door in this valley that would not open to me at any hour. I am often alone upon the road. I am not sure I am lonely.

Text 2: Three Hundred Patients, by Tom Ellery

An original contemporary article.

At nine o’clock on a Saturday night the day team hands over, wishes you luck, and goes home, and you become the only junior doctor responsible for the medical wards of a large teaching hospital. On my first night that meant around three hundred patients across six floors, a bleep that went off on average every four minutes, and a list of jobs that grew faster than I could cross them off.

I was never physically alone. There were nurses on every ward, patients in every bed, relatives in the corridors, and a registrar somewhere in the building who could be called if things went badly wrong, though everyone made it clear that she was very busy and that calling her was a last resort. Yet I have never felt lonelier than I did at three in the morning, standing beside the bed of a man whose blood pressure was falling, trying to decide by myself whether this was the moment for the last resort. The decision felt enormous and the corridor felt very long.

What saved me was small. A staff nurse called Bernie, who had been on nights for twenty years and had seen a great many new doctors come and go, put a cup of tea in my hand at four, told me I had done the right thing, and talked me through the next three bleeps. She did not have to. By the time the sun came up I felt less like a fraud and more like part of a team. But I still remember that corridor.

‘Both writers present the doctor’s work as lonely.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what we learn about the challenges each doctor faces
• explain how far you agree that both writers present the doctor’s work as lonely
• compare the ways the writers present their experiences as doctors.

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.