Maurice Gueret

Could doctors follow veterinary surgeons into the corporate crematorium business, asks Maurice Gueret, who has hop tales from a much-loved surgeon

A health column with a difference

Pet ashes

A headline caught my eye on the business pages recently — ‘Veterinary group collars share boost’. A big corporation has been sniffing around the UK, buying up veterinary practices and offering to get their tails wagging. Despite a net debt of over €100m, the company has investors and stock exchange analysts drooling, by raising sales income by 8pc in the last year. Fees for small-animal work have gone up just 3pc in its 500 surgeries, but they have seen a strong rise in the selling of pet insurance. The company runs an online service for animal owners that trades in medicines, pet food and animal products. And it also owns seven pet crematoriums. I suppose you could call it a cradle-to-grave service. Or basket to dust. Is this a portend of things to come in human healthcare too? A patient did tell me once that I’d have been a lovely undertaker.

Heart brush

A connection between a healthy mouth and a fit heart mightn’t seem obvious. But patients with artificial heart valves do receive antibiotics before tooth extractions or scaling work. This prevents bacteria being loosened into the bloodstream where they may latch onto heart valves. A new study in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology hints that we should, perhaps, all be brushing our teeth three times a day. The 10-year study of 160,000 older South Koreans suggests that thrice daily brushing of the teeth and gums reduces the risk of atrial fibrillation (a potentially serious rhythm disturbance) and heart failure by 10pc. The suggestion is that frequent tooth brushing reduces bacteria living in the pocket between the teeth and gums, who might take holidays in the bloodstream. Official advice remains to brush twice a day. But this may change with further studies like this one.

Professor Barry

Sad news recently with the passing of Professor Barry O’Donnell, pictured right, a paediatric surgeon of great renown and sociability, who had operated at all of Dublin’s children’s hospitals. Barry began his education in the 1930s with the Christian Brothers in Cork. It was said of him that he exceeded his mother’s expectations, and not many Cork boys do that. Barry described himself as a “second-class brain with a world-class training”, but he also had divine assistance. On his Rome honeymoon in 1959, Pope John XXIII blessed Barry’s hands and then decided to bless his head. “That’s where the decisions are made,” said the Pope. My father knew Barry better than I did, but as a fellow book lover, we did correspond in later life. Barry told me that as a young graduate, he worked as a GP locum in the village of Hawkhurst in Kent. The doctor who was going on holidays drove five cars, including an Alvis and a Jowlett Javelin. He left Barry in charge of these, along with an 11-bedroom house, a cook who used to work for the Bowes-Lyon family of the late Queen Mother, and instructions to throw a few parties. Patients of the practice included England’s most renowned gay pairing of the time, Vita Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicolson. When they discovered that young Barry was a reader of the Spectator, they invited him over for tea! Kent was over-run with ‘hoppers’ each summer, East Enders who came for the seasonal hop-picking. Barry told me that common medical conditions these temporary residents suffered from were hop rash (a form of contact dermatitis) and tenosynovitis of the right thumb, a consequence of picking too many hops. His only cure for both conditions was to send them home to London.

Loose goose

A patient in surgery once told me he was “loose as a goose and weak as a kitten”. He described a nasty dose of diarrhoea that outstayed its welcome. Last week, I found out where the expression ‘loose as a goose’ comes from. I am reading a book called Sea Room by Adam Nicolson, who, coincidentally, is a grandson of the aforementioned Vita and Harold. Adam’s a seabird man. His family own the Shiants, three lonely islands near the Outer Hebrides. And he knows a thing or two about Barnacle geese, whose lives are dictated by their intestines. They are herbivores that eat all day when they can. But they can only take off and fly when their stomachs are empty. Which means food for a goose has a very short transit time. This, says Adam Nicholson, is why a goose is as ‘loose as a goose’. And why his islands in springtime are carpeted in either goose poos or geese’s faeces.