Dr Garrett FitzGerald recalls one particular medical colleague whose prodigious memory allowed him to soak up information and take an unconventional route through the education system.
I used to meet my colleague at European congresses in various cities. He rarely went into the live sessions. “Tried it a few times to no avail, so I gave it up,” he said.
We went way back. We attended the same second-level school and college. He graduated in medicine with flying colours. Our latest meeting took place at our umpteenth international conference in Barcelona. He was wandering around the commercial exhibition, going from stand to stand, gathering complementary printouts from prestigious journals, inspecting the latest scanners and gizmos, sometimes sitting and reading, now and again interrogating a guy who was selling stuff.
I recalled him in his early years as giddy and sort of feckless, a restless Jack-in-the box, all transmit and no receive. A nice guy, but with a tendency to blurt out the wrong thing at the wrong time.
“I have no idea why I would say some of those things. People were really turned off. I’m a bit better now but it can still happen. Then I’ll spend weeks regretting it. The truth is that a lot of people regard me as a person without the gravitas appropriate to my station.” He laughed at this.
We relaxed with a coffee, watching with amusement as ‘delegates’ bagged whatever freebies were in the offing; we saw an anxious woman who had acquired five umbrellas which unapologetically advertised metered-dose-inhalers. I encouraged my man a little further and he responded.
“Do you know that I never lasted more than five minutes in a lecture hall?” he asked. “And I’d always have to stay to the end. There were four hours of lectures every afternoon and I never learned anything from even one. That was every weekday for years. All the guy would have to do is talk for two minutes and I would fade away, no matter how I tried not to. In the early years at college, attendance was compulsory. In the later years, I never attended a single one. I’m living proof that these lectures aren’t necessary at all. For me, they were soul destroying.”
Kindly clerics
In school, he was always in trouble — never paying the slightest attention, often interrupting, always fidgety. The kindly clerics with long dresses knew how to cure him; they beat the hell out of him day-in, day-out, and they came to despise him. The feeling became irreversibly mutual in no time.
He was taken aside regularly for a dressing down. His school reports spoke of a boy of bad behaviour and low character without redeeming features. His father wondered about it all because the academic part of the reports always showed high marks in every subject, top 5 per cent persistently. The teachers suspected cheating of the first water, which plunged his perceived ‘character’ to an even more infernal nadir.
“For many decades,” he continued, “I believed it myself. I just knew that I wasn’t the full package. Yet I was greatly interested in the subjects to which I just couldn’t pay attention. But, I also knew that I had something the other lads didn’t have; I could concentrate greatly on the written word and learn the whole shagging lot in a very short time. In medical school, I could study effectively for 10 or 11 hours a day for weeks on end. So, I had no problem at all with examinations; pissed up, never failed even one. Sometimes, the examining lecturer would have never seen me before. And, I had a prodigious memory, particularly for clinical detail.”
Holmes, I presume
I knew that he had always been very sharp at the job. He could zone in on the patient’s problem and dissect its constituents a la Sherlock Holmes.
“In a one-to-one situation, I could concentrate deeply and think, evaluate and conclude almost effortlessly. As a more senior medical student, I haunted the hospital corridors at night. I loved it. Next morning there would be a teaching session in the lecture hall in the hospital, maybe even on a patient I had seen the previous evening, and I’d be awol before the guy had finished saying bonjour. When at all possible, I dropped those sessions as a total waste of time.”
That conversation took place in 1989. I remember that he wondered aloud if they would ever discover the illness he had suffered from. It hadn’t gone away, you know, but it had eased slightly over the years. He kept on trying.
“Yesterday, I went to what they call a ‘Plenary Session’ on hypersensitivity pneumonitis, given by the main man brought over from the States. There were fifteen-hundred doctors in the hall. After three minutes, that had dropped to fourteen hundred and ninety-nine. I came out here and picked up a load of reprints on the subject and had it all pat before the lecture was half-way through.
“I hope the schools nowadays are convinced that beating the bejaysus out of fellas like me is therapeutically sub-optimal. Maybe they don’t still regard my kind of student as belonging to the untermenschen. If I met some of those guys in the street, I’d feel justified if there were a few shots fired!”
I assured him, over-genuinely, that someday, someone would name his syndrome. I headed off.
He called after me, in volume enough for the world and his mother to hear: “Are you still beating the wife, you hoor?”