Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

What’s in a name? Quite a lot, it seems. Well, it’s not so much the
name as the handle. People are wonderfully sensitive about their handles,
particularly that prefix ‘doctor’. When I was a lad it usually meant that
the user had earned a place on the medical register and was more or less
qualified to exercise the healing art, and nobody was worried by the fact
that the vast majority of ‘doctors’ didn’t actually possess a doctorate.
It was a title otherwise used only by a few distinguished academics, mostly
divines, and of a kind who had scant reason to be addressed by the hoi polloi.
It was a useful label which the laity well understood.

But then, as always, our native mores and understandings became corrupted
by happenings in the US of A.

The Americans invented the PhD. Originally a doctorate was the highest
degree granted by universities, and was reserved for luminaries who had
demonstrated exceptional worth and learning. Lesser and more junior scholars,
having achieved a baccalaureate, could acquire a bit more book learning,
and undertake a little ‘research’, and become ‘Masters’ in their trade.
(Unless, of course, they happened to be Oxbridge graduates, in which case
the payment of a modest fee was-and is-sufficient to procure the higher
status.)

But that wasn’t good enough for our transatlantic cousins. Handles are
cherished and desired, and, since, by reason of their great democratic tradition,
they don’t have any ‘Lords’ or ‘Sirs’ or ‘Royal Highnesses’, there was a
need to find a substitute. And what better than ‘doctor’?

So they invented the PhD. It was to become the normal reward for everybody
pursuing a period of postgraduate endeavour, be it in cosmology or pizza
marketing techniques. ‘Masterships’ were out, except for the dim or lazy
who couldn’t quite make the new higher grade, and an MSc, or whatever, became
the postgraduate equivalent of a third class first degree.

The rest of us had to follow suit, and as a result the world is now
flooded with doctors of this, that and the other. But every solution creates
more problems than it solves, and the efflorescence of so many ‘doctors’
has provoked jealousy and resentment in the breasts of worthy citizens who
can still only describe themselves as a plain Mr or Mrs or Ms, but who feel
themselves as well or better qualified to carry the title than most of the
host of the dignified.

British dentists have long hankered after the address, and for years
now the correspondence columns of the British Dental Journal have been littered
with peevish complaints from toothwrights who think they should be called
‘doctor’. This is a desire doubtless fuelled by the well-researched finding
that dentists tend to paranoia, suspecting themselves and their craft to
be underrespected by their clients.

Their discontent is enhanced by the fact that many of their foreign
colleagues are indeed so-called doctors. They yearn for the imagined status
of the handle, ignoring the fact that they are primarily surgeons, possessed
of special surgical skills, and that here in Britain medical graduates who
have achieved such status proudly abandon the ‘doctor’ label, and revert
to becoming a Mr or Mrs or Miss (or Ms) in order to distinguish themselves
from the commonalty of their profession.

Vets don’t seem to suffer such hang-ups. But perhaps they do, in a secretive
way, because I’ve noticed that my favourite vet has taken to calling his
kennel maids ‘nurses’. And that, none too subtly, implies that he, as their
boss, is a-well-you know what.

Anyway, the dental profession has decided to take positive action (or
to become ‘proactive’ as a wretched and currently fashionable neologism
has it). The British Dental Association has decided to address its members
as ‘doctor’ in communications and at association meetings. That may make
members feel better about themselves. Whether it makes the rest of us feel
any better about dentists remains to be seen.

However, I don’t want to seem entirely negative in the matter. I cherish
a press release from the World Health Organization stating that a conference
on AIDS had been opened by ‘Her Royal Highness, Professor Doctor, the Princess
Chulabhorn of Thailand’. Now there’s a lovely bunch of handles, and we’d
be the poorer off without such fun.

But I suggest that for most of us labels are a needless source of jealousy
and confusion, and we’d be better off not using the damned things. I prefer
to be known as, yours sincerely, Donald Gould. Doctors, after all, are two
a penny, but there’s only one of me.