  There are two kinds of ethnic jokes.
The ones told by outsiders -- usually prejudiced and harsh -- and those told inside
-- usually incomprehensible to the outsider, and not very funny even when
explained.Last time I promised to tell the
unfortunate tale of my rotation on obstetrics. But for the past year and a half --
thanks to a vicious stab in the back by people I had considered friends -- I've been
having to work 12 to 16 hours a day and have been stressed to the max. (The
scoundrels' actions backfired and actually improved my practice. A Pyrrhic victory,
at best.) The last thing I want to do today is remember County Hospital and the
insane resident who wanted to hurt medical students.So instead, I'm going to tell some of
the jokes that doctors tell about each other.# # # #
Every culture has its subclass of
fools and innocents. Growing up in San Francisco, we deplored Oakland or Chico
(where they sold Velveeta in the gourmet aisle). Los Angeles made fun of Pasadena.
New York scorns everyone. In Tennessee (with it's motto "Thank God for Arkansas and
Mississippi" -- the states that keep it from being fiftieth in everything) we
snicker at our neighbor Alabama. (What has 40 teeth and 80 legs? An Alabama family
reunion... Why did O.J. Simpson move to Alabama? Because everyone has the same DNA
there.)In medicine, most jokes traditionally
are at the expense of the surgeons, a practice probably dating back to the times
when doctors had clean hands and surgeons cut hair on the side. Surgeons are
portrayed as, well, less than intellectually gifted. Or as an orthopedic surgeon I
once dated bragged, "I'm as strong as an ox and twice as smart."An internist and a surgeon come to an
elevator. The door is closing, so the internist inserts his hand."Why'd you do that?" asks the
surgeon."Well," the internist answers, "you
use the least important part of your body to stop an elevator door."They go into another wing, and
approach another elevator. It's closing. So the surgeon sticks his head in.This joke has had less play locally
since a woman tried this downtown. Unsuccessfully.# # # #
The classical doctor joke, from which
infinite variations spring, is The Duck Joke.A general practitioner, an internist,
and a surgeon go duck hunting. A duck flies overhead, and the GP says, "Gee, kinda
looks like a duck," and shoots it.Another duck flies overhead, and the
internist sights it. "Duck, rule out pheasant, rule out goose," he says, and shoots
it.A third bird flies overheard. The
surgeon raises his gun. BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! Then he looks at the others. "What
was that?" he asks.Variations usually feature other
specialties. One I recall has an internist calling, "Duck, duck, come back! I want
to examine you!" then the psychiatrist yelling, "Duck, duck, I want to talk to you!"
and then BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!My surgical chief resident, Frank
Psychosis, told me his version of The Duck Joke once. "There's this room," he said,
"and the internist goes in and after an hour he comes out with a bunch of notes.
Then the surgeon walks in and turns around and comes out and says, 'That's a
duck'."He laughed uproariously. When I
realized that that must have been the punch line, I said, "Good one, Frank."My favorite version of The Duck Joke
makes fun of radiologists. (Nowadays most radiologists work long hours, do all
sorts of procedures, and contribute to patient care. But twenty years ago they came
in late, read a few films, and left. There are still a couple of hospitals I know
where they disappear early and get very upset if you ask them to do something out of
the ordinary, like look at an emergency scan and call you if there's a
hemorrhage.)An internist, a surgeon and a
radiologist go duck hunting. There aren't any ducks, so they start bragging about
their dogs. Finally they decide to have a contest.They put down a chocolate chip cake.
The internist points to the cake and says to his dog, "Sic it, Osler!"Osler trots to the cake, takes out a
notebook, and writes down all the ingredients, in descending order by concentration.
Then he carries the note back to his master and wags his tail."Good boy, Osler! Impressive,
huh?"The surgeon snarls and says to his
dog, "Get it, Halsted!"Halsted runs over, takes out a
scalpel, divides the cake into equal sections, dissects out all the chocolate chips
and puts them in a container to sent to pathology. Then he goes back to his
master."Good dog, Halsted," the surgeon says
smugly."You haven't seen anything yet," says
the radiologist. "Okay, Roentgen!"Roentgen runs over, eats the cake,
screws the other two dogs, and gets home by 3 o'clock.Usually after I tell that joke to a
radiologist (who always starts to protest "But we aren't like that anymore!") I
defuse the situation by telling the only neurologist joke I know.(Before the advent of CAT Scans and
MRI -- and often even with them -- a neurologist would perform a lengthy physical
examination in order to tell what part of the nervous system was involved,
'localizing the lesion'. Of course, most conditions were -- and still are --
untreatable. A famous neurologist in the fifties once described his job as
"Diagnose, adios.")Two neurologists are hot air
ballooning when clouds come up and they realize they're lost. They go lower, and
suddenly the clouds part and they see that they're passing over a field where a man
is on a tractor.One of the neurologists leans out and
yells, "Hey! Where are we?"The man on the tractor looks up and
shouts back, "In a balloon!"Then the clouds swallow them up again.
The first neurologist smiles. "This has been a great day! We saw good scenery, we
put back some brewskies, and now to make the day complete, the first guy we meet is
a neurologist too.""Wait a minute!" interjects his
friend. "That looked like a farmer to me. What makes you say he's a
neurologist?""Well, think about how he answered
our question. He gave us precise localization and it didn't help a bit."# # # #
In recent years medical care has been
become the hostage of insurance companies. They decide if tests and treatments are
appropriate, who can do them, and where. My office staff spends half the day trying
to get basic tests approved, and more time arguing when they decide not to pay for
it anyway. And few things can be more infuriating, in the middle of a busy day,
than to receive a phone call saying you have to send a patient home because he isn't
approved for further in-hospital days.I met a new patient in the emergency
room with a cervical spinal cord lesion -- paralyzed legs, bowel, and bladder.
After treatment he was able to walk again, Six months later he came to my office
with difficulty breathing and inability to urinate. Fearing his disease was flaring
-- fearing he would become totally paralyzed and die -- I admitted him to the
hospital. Luckily it was a false alarm.The insurance reviewer called me up
to complain. "You shouldn't have admitted him. In fact," she went on, "you
shouldn't have admitted him last time.""Last time... But he was paralyzed!"
I protested in disbelief."Paralysis," she sneered. "You could
have handled that outpatient."So you can imagine how much we all
love this joke.Three doctors die and go to heaven.
"Why do you think I should let you in?" asks Saint Peter."I was in medical research," the first
doctor replies. "I worked on vaccines, and I saved millions of lives.""Go on in," Saint Peter says.The next doctor says, "I didn't save
millions of lives, but I was a rural family practioner and I helped a lot of people
with little reward.""Go on in, it's a pleasure to have
you with us."The third doctor smiles proudly, "I
was medical director for an insurance company.""Go on in," says St. Peter. "But
you're only approved for three days."If you think insurance companies are
bad, managed care and HMOs are worse. I heard this while rounding Christmas
week.Why did Mary come to Bethlehem?That's where the nearest obstetrics
provider was.Why did she give birth in a
manager?She wasn't approved for in-patient
days.# # # #
I'll end with my favorite joke from
residency. I suspect it was adapted from an army joke -- I can just hear the roles
being taken by a captain, a sergeant and a private -- but I like it anyway.The resident and the attending are
talking while the intern charts orders. "I dunno," says the attending. Lately it
seems like sex is 90% work and only 10% pleasure.""I respectfully disagree with you,"
says the resident. "It's 90% pleasure and only 10% work."They argue for a while and, unable to
reach a consensus, decide to ask the intern."What I think," replies the intern,
"is that it must be 100% pleasure. Because if there was any work involved, you'd
have me doing it." - - - - - - - - - -
Michael A. Burstein was one of our many readers who found Sharon's article as
incisive as it was funny: "I have one brother who's a paramedic and another who's an
Emergency Medicine Physician, so I have a slight insider's perspective on these
jokes. For example, I had already heard the duck joke and the neurologist/balloon
joke from my brothers -- but the one about the dogs floored me. The ones about
insurance companies and HMOs, on the other hand, were frightening, as they hit far
too close to the truth. Which I'm sure Dr. Farber realized." On the other hand,
Ken Lake wrote us (from England) that "as a dedicated admirer of Sharon Farber, I
have to admit that she's right: her in-house jokes are just not funny. Mind you, I
had to get translations of 'internist' (physician) and 'intern' (resident assistant
surgeon or physician) before I had any idea what she was talking about anyway. ...
We really are two peoples separated by a single language!"Mimosa 18 was published a few
months prior to the 1996 Worldcon, L.A.Con III, so we were only too happy to be able
to include an fan history article about west coast fandom. In the early 1950s, one
of the most renown fan clubs in the entire world was the Little Mens' club of the
San Francisco area. It wasn't as big as its neighbor LASFS to the south, or as
friendly as its other neighbor, the Nameless Ones, to its north, but it had a
special claim to fame that the others couldn't match -- it was featured in a news
story that made headlines in newspapers around the world. It was an event that was,
literally, out of this world:Title illustration by Charlie Williams |
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