Re: "Dr." and all that

[brian whatcott <inet@INTELLISYS.NET>]

At 16:06 12/29/00 -0600, Professor Hodges (!) wrote:
> Some Americans think "Dr." should only be used for M.D.s, but I notice that
> most people - adults and students - will refer to me as "Dr. Hodges"

/snip/
>  An English doctor told me that in the
> England medical interns are called "Dr." but the distinguished surgeons are
> respectfully referred to as "Mister."
>
> Laurent Hodges, Professor of Physics
> 12 Physics Hall, Iowa State University, Ames, IA  50011-3160
> lhodges@iastate.edu   http://www.public.iastate.edu/~lhodges

Titles are context-sensitive. In an academic context, the academic
qualification is germaine. Part of the context is cultural: the American
idiom is towards egalitarianism; the British idiom has been towards
classification and differentiation.
Arguably, a people that has been melting together for two millenia
seeks to find marks of distinction, and a people whose diversity
is still visibly salient seeks to find marks of conformity.

It was noticeable, and not so long ago that in a business context,
a British person of very modest academic development (like me)
 might title himself
B Whatcott BS MIEEE MIEE RAS(Can) FCC GenComm/Radar PPL (etc., etc.)
in a manner that looks excessively pretentious, misleading, even
ludicrous in the American eye.  Or to take another difference:
a university teacher in Britain is not thereby a professor,
and a university professor there is not necessarily a PhD.

In American usage by contrast, PhDs are usually not
encouraged to trail their pedigree on business cards etc., unless
it serves a sales purpose. It is sad to report that academic
qualifications are sometimes concealed in business, in order
to avoid the disqualifying qualifier, "Over-qualified" by which
some folks are dogged.

And then when the flesh is frail, we find spiritual support in
endowing medical care givers with quasi-supernatural qualities:
it is not a matter only of ego that physicians sometimes act like
 petty gods: we demand it.

    They may remark that the most casual patient relationship soon
comes round when life becomes imperilled and so (I cannot desist
 from remarking) the US free enterprise system encourages the
aggrandizement of symptoms to life-threatening status: the
physician's quarter million dollar mean income is bolstered,
the drug industry is encouraged to throw a tithe of its profits
 to developing patent-evading drug variants...ahem...
I mean, is encouraged to develop new drug varieties, while the
formerly potent magic bullets are expended on palliative daily
animal feed fortification.

The usual British medical qualification is the MB.BS.,
the batchelor of medicine and surgery. The physician is indeed
addressed as 'doctor' in the surgery there regardless.
The fields of surgery and medicine are considered seperate skills.
This was a historical convenience in a country where distances
are comparitively small and the population closely aggregated.
 In contrast, one can tap an American physician on the shoulder and
he may be transformed to a hospital surgeon, where the distances
are huge.

I do not tire of recalling to appropriate audiences that American
life expectancy, though much improved in the last century, still does not
quite match the European standard, despite the factor of two, three or
four by which free enterprise medicine expenditure, US style exceeds
the predictably inefficient bureaucratic 'socialized' European style
 of wait-in-line health care.

    I will usually not wait long to hear that the fault lies with the
American consumer, whose excesses contribute to his demise.
Certainly the joke that half the population is overweight in the US
(or anywhere else) can be supplemented by the realisation that not only
 is that half heavier than the median, but a good proportion are 'obese'
with clinical connotations.

But this is quite enough about the US medical 'free' enterprise
for this happy day.
brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net>  Altus OK
                Eureka!