Breaking bread together

To the Editor: Somerset Maugham noted, “At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely”.1

Your recent column lamenting the disappearance of doctors’ dining and common rooms2 precipitated a flood of warm memories of, in my case, St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s.

Now based in the Latrobe Valley, Victoria, I have witnessed first-hand, over almost 20 years, much grievous political and social engineering — the abject failure of the first “privatisation” of a public hospital in Victoria and, in the custom-designed “greenfields” hospital, the near-complete lack of provision of facilities for consultant medical staff, leading to their fleeting meeting in corridors and carparks. It is unlikely that C P Snow had this in mind when he wrote of “corridors of power”.3

Contemporary medical staff are indeed an amorphous lot. The clinical white coat is but a memory, and often the only way to recognise a doctor, usually dressed in a manner that would suggest forthcoming involvement in a “Clean up Australia” gathering, is the fashionably appropriate half-noose stethoscope, which, akin to a saint’s halo, confers immediate status on the bearer.

Laennec, who invented the stethoscope in 1819, had surely not foreseen the commercial potential of his epochal invention.