Medicine: How to Treat a Doctor

Like many another medical journal, London’s Lancet has printed reams of advice to doctors on how to behave toward their patients. Now the Lancet has let a layman turn the table and tell how the patient should treat the doctor. With tongue firmly planted in cheek, Londoner Marguerite A. Sieghart wrote:

“The first data given in a case history are usually name, address and age, and if the patient is a woman, the profession of her husband. For women, two important points already arise. First as to her age. If at all possible, an experienced patient will avoid giving an age between 40 and 60, for it is part of the acknowledged armory of modern medicine to hold the climacteric responsible for all complaints arising in this period of a woman’s life. The absence of specific symptoms is immaterial…Every complaint from toothache to corns may be explained by ovarian deficiency, and thus held to be merely functional—a consideration which delights the doctor but has never yet cured a patient.

“Quite as important as…age is…marital state. No experienced patient will admit to being unhappily married or, far worse, divorced; for she well knows the automatic train of thought such an admission will set in motion: a divorced woman is a misunderstood woman; a misunderstood woman is an unsatisfied woman; a woman who cannot lead a full sex life will clearly suffer damage in body and soul. This chain of reasoning cannot be broken—not even by an assurance that one is leading the life of a wanton.

“The next point raised is the patient’s family history…The hard-boiled [patient] will describe herself, wherever possible, as a foundling. [Finally she] must indicate the symptoms that have led her to the consulting room…For the patient, the disease consists of the discomforts which she experiences in her own body. To the doctor, these are important only in so far as they support his diagnosis. He regards them as symptoms if he can use them, and as hallucinations if they hinder him…

“It is the patient’s difficult and responsible task to provide the clues that will guide the doctor to the right diagnosis. If the attempt fails, it must be repeated…with a different doctor, for there is nothing more hopeless than to try to change the mind of a doctor who has once reached a diagnosis.”

Vienna-born Marguerite Sieghart, a legal authority and author of Government by Decree, can give firsthand evidence; she is “between 40 and 60” and has been divorced.