Capnography: Clinical Aspects
2005; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 98; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1177/014107680509800418
ISSN1758-1095
Autores Tópico(s)Subtitles and Audiovisual Media
ResumoDespite having enjoyed several of his other works, I opened Ian McEwan's latest novel expecting disappointment.As I read it in the surgeons' coffee room, a consultant grabbed it from me.'A novel about a neurosurgeon?I bet it's just one big cliche ´,' he said, expressing concern that I wasn't reading Bailey and Love or some other such character-building surgical text.His assumption about the book was not unfounded.Neurosurgery enjoys a certain mystique in public perception.Many outside medicine consider it on a par with rocket science in its technical difficulties and intellectual challenges.And the media has played upon this image.One example is in the American television sitcom Friends in which the witless actor Joey lands his most famous role playing suave Portuguese neurosurgeon Drake Ramore in a TV soap.A leading article in The New Yorker even elevates the discipline to a high-performance art form, comparing the 'physical genius' of Californian neurosurgeon Charlie Wilson to that of Wayne Gretzky at ice-hockey or Yo-Yo Ma in a cello concerto. 1Even the British Medical Association's recommended careers guide for medical students and junior doctors, entitled So You Want to be a Brain Surgeon?, panders to the popular image of neurosurgery 2 -though many outside the specialty find truth in its tongue-in-cheek description of neurosurgeons as 'clever egotists, some of whose patients end up as cabbages'.Few could deny that neurosurgery is a specialty with little margin for error and a need for both pragmatism and optimism.Any specialty that invents a disability rating scale where a corpse scores a fifth of the available points, as they would in the Glasgow Coma Score, deserves such a
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