ABSTRACT
Source: Karmi, G. In Search of Fatima. A Palestinian story. London: Verso, 2002. Reproduced by permission.
The early months of 1963 were bitterly cold. There were prolonged snowfalls that year and we were glad that we would spend the worst of the weather in lodgings in Southmead Hospital. Our consultant teachers varied; a few were gentle, but the majority were capricious egoists. It was on the ‘firms’—study groups of ten or so students-that we were closely subjected to their paternalism and their arbitrary exercise of power over us. Anxiously, we studied their every vagary because the medical world operated on a system of networks and personal recommendations and it was important not to offend. Everyone dreaded the fate of the mythical houseman (junior hospital doctor) who, having completed his first house job (as pre-registration hospital appointments were known) received a reference from his consultant to this effect: ‘Dr So-and-so tells me that he has been my houseman for the last six months.’ Or, in a variation of the story, the reference went: ‘This man has been working for me over the last six months to his own satisfaction.’ The reign of fright we lived under merely reinforced for me the paternalism and prohibitions of my childhood.
