Article Text
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Becoming a doctor was predestined, but becoming a neurologist was a matter of free will. My great-grandfather was, like my brother, a general practitioner. My grandfather was a surgeon, my father a physician and my elder daughter, who was not then a twinkle in either her father's or mother's eye, was to be an obstetrician. Although I knew I wanted to be a doctor from childhood, I followed a family tradition, starting with classics at school and switching with relief to biology in my last year. At Cambridge, my tutor was a neuroanatomist and our neuroscience lecturers were almost all Fellows of the Royal Society. Pat Merton, a neurophysiologist, demonstrated vestibular function by blindfolding a duck and showing how she kept her head upright even with her body upside down. William Rushton, a visual physiologist, explained the action potential as being like the all or none action of a lavatory cistern. Dixon Boyd, Professor of Anatomy, demonstrated a brain with agenesis of the cerebellum which was alleged to have belonged to a steeplejack (an allegation later refuted in Brain). This gave me an inappropriately low opinion of the importance of the cerebellum. By the end of the 2 year first part of the Natural Sciences Tripos, neurology was my goal. The choice was endorsed during the second part of the Tripos (a year similar to a modern intercalated BSc). Its practical courses were led …
Footnotes
-
Competing interests None.
-
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- CLINICAL EVALUATION AND INVESTIGATION OF NEUROPATHY
- Musculoskeletal manifestations of lysosomal storage disorders
- Neurological presentation of Fabry's disease in a 52 year old man
- Identification of patients with Pompé disease using routine pathology results: PATHFINDER (creatine kinase) study
- Neurosyphilis in the modern era
- Pontine stroke mimicking Bell’s palsy: a cautionary tale!
- ‘Doctor Google’ ending the diagnostic odyssey in lysosomal storage disorders: parents using internet search engines as an efficient diagnostic strategy in rare diseases
- New approaches to the clinical diagnosis of inherited heart muscle disease
- P55 The efficacy and effectiveness of 5-holed salt shakers for reducing salt dispensed by fish and chip shops
- Neurology and the skin