The day I started surgery in Collintrae I found seven elderly women in my waiting-room. They didn't look ill.
"It became clear that it was I, not them, who was to be examined and assessed. These women had seen off five doctors in the last decade and were going to add another to their list."
When the Telegraph & Argus's medical expert Dr Tom Smith starts his new post as GP in a sleepy village on the west coast of Scotland, nothing could prepare him for the trials and joys that lay ahead.
He swaps an urban practice in land-locked Birmingham for an eccentric seaside village where the residents include giggling nuns, a reclusive spinster prone to throwing her elderly mother into the river, and a mute hermit living in a cave on the beach. With one church, three pubs and three shops, life in Collintrae was going to be very different from the one Tom had left behind.
A Seaside Practice, Tales of a Scottish Country Doctor chronicles Tom's experiences in a small fishing community where his patients range from tramps to blue-blooded landowners.
Born in Glasgow, Tom's early working life was in Birmingham but he and his wife Mairi longed to return to their native Scotland, so when the chance arose to be the family doctor for a coastal Lowlands community, he grabbed it.
"The phone rang and a man's voice, agitated and breathless, said: Doctor, you'll hae to come quick. Maggie's drappit her mammy in the Muck!'," writes Tom. "I uttered the word for which I would become famous over the next few weeks: Pardon?'"
His stories are heartwarming without being twee. Tom's medical training and no-nonsense approach ensure that he steers clear of the whimsy flavouring so many Tales of' compilations.
His stories capture the beauty of the Lowlands and the peculiar traits of its inhabitants, such as the farmer who manages to knock out himself and his entire herd of cows with chloroform, a baker with nine lives who survives some horrific car accidents, an old man with a boil that turns out to be syphilis and a family going slowly insane due to lead poisoning from their pipes.
There's the 98-year-old with all her own teeth, the oddball fisherman whose long hair saves him from drowning, and the strange case of the collapsing men who awake after a night's heavy drinking afflicted with painful spots on their chests. It doesn't take Tom long to discover that the spots match the hobnails on the boots of one of their drinking party Tom finds himself in hospital when he's involved in a car accident, while driving to attend the victim of another one. After having 200 tiny stitches in his eyelids, forehead and cheeks, he's told his face will "grow into his scars."
Tom writes with humour and affection for the characters he befriends but doesn't flinch from more serious aspects of his medical career. As a student he worked in a psychiatric hospital, "a collection of Victorian buildings in the country where the patients could be hidden from public gaze." Barbiturates were given in high doses to keep the patients quiet so the ward was populated with "burnt-out hopeless cases who sat and stared, waiting for bedtimes when oblivion could overtake them."
He writes of in-patients with severe depression given electroconvulsive therapy, and of caring for them afterwards when the inevitable confusion ensued. Particularly moving is the death of an elderly patient who had been admitted to the hospital aged 13 simply because he "stroked the hair of a young girl passing by."
Some tales of his medical experiences might prompt an "Eeuw!" from the squeamish reader, but it's a credit to Tom's writing skills that he reveals just enough to entertain us, while saving us from the gorier details. His memories of his first post-mortem examination is laugh-out-loud funny.
The book is a delightful account of life as a country doctor. Among the tales of human characters and their ailments, joys and sorrows, are accounts of sick calves, pregnant pigs and drunk pheasants, bringing rural existence alive on the page. It would make an ideal Sunday evening TV series.
He goes to great lengths to reach his patients - wading into rivers, clambouring over rocks to a lighthouse, teetering on a rooftop facing a deranged gunman and being lowered by firefighters in a harness down a mountainside - and his unyielding respect and affection for the people in his care is what makes this an engaging and thoroughly entertaining read.
Dr Tom Smith, 67, has been the T&A's medical expert for more than ten years. As well as being a GP, he has written health books, made TV and radio appearances and written for medical journals and newspapers.
- A Seaside Practice, Tales of a Scottish Country Doctor, is published by Short Books, priced £12,99 (hardback).
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