After struggling in dingy classrooms and with the stench of the dissection labs, moving up to clinical school, when we actually started learning in a teaching hospital, was supposed to be a different kettle of fish.

In the first two weeks we had an orientation to the hospital, and were shown around the various departments within it.

We witnessed the post mortem rooms, the laboratories, theatres, the intensive care unit, and the X-ray department.

It was fascinating - patients were undergoing complicated tests and therapies and it all looked very exciting.

On the last day the Professor of Radiology was demonstrating an ultrasound machine and was enthusiastically showing off his own internal organs: "Here's the inferior vena cava, and here's my liver".

Taken in

I remember being absolutely taken by this demonstration of living anatomy, and afterwards I plucked up courage to ask if I could have a go myself.

"Certainly not!" he replied. "These pieces of equipment cost thousands of pounds I couldn't possibly let you operate it"

I never did forgive him for that, but as I was about to discover, a clinical student's life was not as glamorous as the orientation lead me to believe - it consisted almost exclusively of clerking patients.

I could never get quite so enthusiastic about that I'm afraid. Most of these teaching hospital patients had been in and out of hospital so many times, and were I'm sure fed up telling the same story to tens or hundreds of students over the years.

I don't know if they did it on purpose, but rather like folk stories their histories became more embellished as they were retold, and consisted less and less of clinical information, and more of circumstantial stories about the time they visited auntie Gertrude and the budgie wasn't very well and their legs swelled up.

"Whose legs swelled up? Yours or Auntie Gertrude's?"

Nine times out of ten it would have been the budgie's, I can assure you.

Arthritis

There was one patient during an examination who spoke to me for half an hour about her arthritis, and when I came to present the patient to the examiner I discovered that, whilst she did indeed have arthritis that she was in hospital to have a heart pacemaker fitted. She hadn't mentioned it once.

Luckily for me the examiner saw the funny side and was prepared to accept that I had taken a very good account of her arthritis.

Of course, since then I have discovered that someone who comes to see you in agony with abdominal pain won't forget to tell you where it hurts, and couldn't give a stuff about his budgie!

But my mind still wanders back to that professor and I wonder what might have happened if he'd let that enthusiastic medical student 'have a go'.