• Medical Education
• Medical Journalism

Our chosen line of work is pretty unusual. You don't particularly need me to tell you that, but when you reflect at the end of the day on what you've done, or sometimes go over it with non-medical friend, you realise how strange things are. We are allowed to—for the good of our patients—to ask some of the most astonishingly intimate questions within minutes of meeting someone. We're given permission to invade personal space and undertake invasive, painful procedures. And, we form a small fraction of the population who are legally licensed to poison people. That's obviously a fairly dramatic way of putting it, since in common useage, poisoning would ordinarily imply a pretty nasty outcome. But I quite like to remind …