Volume 193 - Issue 11
Diary of a young doctor
Author: Francis J Bowden
Med J Aust 2010; 193 (11): 707. || doi: 10.5694/j.1326-5377.2010.tb04111.x
Published online: 6 December 2010
Published online: 6 December 2010
Chilli, chicks and heart-attacks — the misadventures of an intern by Dr Manju Mendis.
Sanjaya Senanayake. Colombo, Sri Lanka: Perera Hussein Publishing, 2010 (269 pp). ISBN 9789551723118.
If the secret of novelistic success is to write about what you know, then I am more than a little worried about Sanjaya Senanayake. The author, an infectious diseases physician at the Canberra Hospital who already has two popular medical texts to his credit, has thrown away his evidence base in this rollicking and licentious account of the intern year of the handsome Dr Manju Mendis.
Set in the elite St Ivanhoe hospital, there is priapism, onanism and near-miss bestiality — and that is just the opening chapter. We meet the execrable surgeon Professor Monty Bonkzalot, who supplements his income by operating on pets in the hospital after hours, the pulchritudinous television journalist Fabulus Hipz, the culturally confused Lucky King, and the billionaire Pik Freiman, who finds true love in his ninth decade. Dr Mendis stands by and lets a deeply unpleasant woman die, he kills another by inflicting pain to a gouty foot, fails to report a murder and, after sleeping with Hipz, provides her with information that has Bonkzalot sacked. He exposes the career-long lies of “physician to the stars” Spider Croquet and ultimately falls in love with a beautiful sex-worker. The blatant racism that this accentless, locally born son of Sri Lankan parents experiences along the way is met with swift and cruel remedy.
It’s all good fun — think Bollywood meets Scrubs — and an exercise in wish fulfilment that will be appreciated by any young doctor who has suffered at the hands of egomaniacal consultants. The relentless punning will annoy many readers, some of the dialogue doesn’t quite work and, although they have made J K Rowling billions, I would have dropped the ubiquitous adverbs. But if you are looking for the material for a screenplay that explores the issues faced by contemporary second-generation South Asian professionals, this would be a very good place to start.