Doctor was the best medicine!

MEMORIES of a cigar-chuffing doctor have been raising smiles amid the gloom of soaring Covid cases. Hundreds have taken to social media with stories of one of the colourful characters who practised as a GP in the 60s and 70s.

It’s all thanks to a Facebook page called Gone Too Soon: Ilkeston Legends, where people share pictures and memories of “local characters”.

Former patients recall an age when generations of families were cared for by the same doctor and home visits were commonplace – a far cry from today, with GPS hamstrung by paperwork and target-chasing and patients often forced to make do with a telephone consultation or wait weeks to see someone they don’t know.

One old-school doc in particular is remembered for his cheeky remarks and habits that would make today’s health watchdogs apoplectic. But he was simply the best, according to those he treated. And his ever-present cigar is at the heart of stories shared on the Facebook page…

“He was a lovely doctor even if he did smoke cigars whilst he examined you. Always ready for a laugh too.”

“Came to see my aunty ill in bed and made a burn hole in her sheet.”

“He said to me ‘don’t smoke, lassie, it’s no good for you’… whilst he had a fat cigar hanging out of his mouth!”

“Used to sit in our house and not take the fag out of his mouth, just ash and a nub end left. Best doctor ever had.”

“My mum says when I was born, she got transferred to the maternity home. When he did his rounds, he came to check on me and his cigar dropped ash in my cot.”

“He always used to leave the Tannoy on [after calling a patient through]. The receptionists were always running in to tell him to turn it off.”

The doc would take Guinness to new mums in the maternity home, according to one former patient.

And he (accurately) predicted a mum-to-be would have a boy by dangling a needle on a thread over her bump to see which it swung – “left for a boy, right for a girl, he was right”, she recalled.

Another woman said: “He told me I was having a little elephant. Thank God I didn’t. Love ‘im.”

One man went to the surgery with a bad back and was advised to “hang from a door frame”. And when a woman went in with a lump in her wrist, the GP “did no more but pick up a book and hit her hand. It disappeared”.

But my favourite story is this: “Told him I wasn’t feeling very well. He said: ‘Well, you’ve got athlete’s foot and a running nose, you should be quite fit!’ Gave me a smoke ring on my way out.”