Prescribed humour
Comedic memoirs written by hospital doctors about life behind the screens offer mixed results.
In 2010, Adam Kay left behind 97-hour working weeks as a hospital junior doctor for life as a comedian. It seems to have worked. He sold out six years in a row at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and consistently plays to full houses on UK tours.
His 2017 medical memoir, This is Going to Hurt, was a runaway bestseller (I haven’t read it and there was a waiting list of 97 for it at Auckland Libraries when I checked), and ecstatic reviews in the British press commended him for managing to be both humorist and trenchant critic of the running down of the National Health Service. A TV series is in the works, penned by Kay himself.
His new book,
TWAS THE NIGHTSHIFT BEFORE CHRISTMAS (Picador, $24.99),
like the previous one, adopts a diary format, changing names and fudging some details to preserve the dignity of patients, many of whom didn’t seem to have much to start with. As the title suggests, it covers six Christmases between 2002 and 2008 in which he worked in an unnamed hospital, much of that time, apparently, removing objects from orifices into which they should never have been inserted.
At less than 150 pages, it’s much shorter than its predecessor and with barely a hint of political serious mindedness (although there’s a clever moment when he changes a whiteboard chart to ensure an insult to Tony Blair appears in a newspaper photograph). As a result, perhaps, it has the whiff of a rush job, bashed out for the Christmas market, and the humour is broad and blokeish rather than clever. There are certainly moments that raise a chuckle, but I laughed out loud only once. On the other hand, there are affecting glimpses of the hellish horror of working in such understaffed and underresourced institutions: when he asks a plainly traumatised colleague what the matter is, the reply is as bleak as can be imagined: “The vending machine’s broken.” Peter Calder
The title of Sonia Henry’s GOING UNDER (Allen & Unwin, $32.99) is the first of many weak puns as we follow Dr Kitty Holliday on her first placement at a big city hospital then to a rural facility and back again. Kitty wants to be a surgeon and works under the tutelage of three surgical consultants, two of whom Kitty quickly dubs the
Joker and the Shark, and a registrar, her immediate superior, who she calls the Smiling Assassin. Kitty is immediately at sea, though a lifesaving ring appears in the form of the gentlemanly, urbane and rarely seen third consultant, Jack Prince.
Anyone who has worked in the frontline services of a major hospital will have witnessed two things: senior doctors behaving badly and young doctors weeping quietly in a corner – the latter often caused by the former. Major hospitals are innate drama
machines, generating an avalanche of emotions, from the boredom of waiting to the dread clarity of imminent death and despair.
Henry knows the sweaty fear any sane person should feel when inserting sharp metal devices into soft human tissue while struggling to find the right spot. As a junior doctor, she wrote an influential blog calling into question the broken culture that sees successive generations of young doctors sent to deal with the unrelenting tide of disease and disorder in public hospitals. Most senior doctors aim to be kind mentors, but the exception becomes the narrative so we hear only the stories of bullying, harassment and blatant cruelty.
Sadly, the cartoon names sum up Henry’s approach. The novel doesn’t know what it is, with elements of romcom, psychological thriller and critique. Trying to be all these things, it fails to be any one of them, leaving this reader hoping that Henry is a better doctor than writer.