AW

Dined with AW in Kuala Lumpur.

It feels warm to hear how he practised "front line" medicine in the last millenium at a peripheral hospital - I was the surgical houseman in the same hospital, probably around the same time. Inserting a jugular line for someone lying on a camp bed, doing liver / bone marrow / kidney biopsy and endoscopy by the same doctor, inserting 6 chest drains on one day ... Everything seems so unbelievable for trainees nowadays.

For new comers, it is an eternal dilemma whether one should go for busy clinical job - with little chance to think - or for leisured job with plenty of time to study. Of course, that plenty of time does not necessarily result in better thinking. (As Albert Einstein suggested, it may merely be continuous rearrangement of your prejudice.)

On the other hand, if a busy job per se can give rise to a good doctor, we should appoint our ward amah as the professor of medicine !