For the whole of a six month house job half a lifetime ago, he was my friend, colleague, and doppelganger. The rota was grim, a one in two made worse by Saturday receiving: so no weekends off, ever. And once there was a minor misunderstanding and we were both dismissed with immediate effect by a surgical chieftain who was surprised to learn shortly afterwards that he couldn't do that sort of thing any more. We survived. Soon afterwards we were heading downstairs to the mess after another bad day, both whistling the Slaves' Chorus from Nabucco. The chief appeared round a corner, frowned even though we had stopped whistling, then wheezed his way on upwards. It was the nearest we came to rebellion.
With no particular effort or ambition, my friend had achieved the envied double: both house jobs in professorial units. His ward was well run and his handwriting legible. He was practical, straightforward, and sensible to a fault, and once gave me advice on my personal life that I sometimes still regret not having taken.
His patients liked him a lot. When I was called to his ward at night elderly women would ask me if he was going to be a general practitioner, because they wanted—as they put it—“to be on his panel.” He duly became a GP. I came across his patients from time to time in hospital over the decades, and yes, they all thought the world of him.
A few weeks ago his name appeared unexpectedly in the Scotsman: “Suddenly at home...” with details about a funeral the following Friday. For most medical funerals, being five minutes early is fine. It wasn't for his: a large church already full, so four of us—friends, colleagues, and messmates from that long gone teaching hospital world—stood together in the sun outside, in an extended congregation that heard the hymns only faintly, but in which it was all right to talk.
That helped. There was shock and grief, a good story or two from younger happier times, and an unexpected brush with survivors' guilt. We were all as old. He had been fit and active. We were still here and he was not. It wasn't fair. But as the last hymn faded and hundreds followed his coffin out into the sun, it was obvious again: his patients still thought the world of him.