Matt Morgan: The death of the traditional medical career

Abstract

Two hours into the beautiful drive through mid-Wales to the Machynlleth Comedy Festival, my friend James and I got onto a serious topic of conversation—diaries. While James has stuck to his faithful “week to view” leatherbound journal, my life is coordinated with multiple coloured events and recurring reminders in an ever more complex digital diary. Like a Swiss army knife with wi-fi, it reads my emails, slices meetings to size, decides on scheduling, and even uncorks my forgotten anniversaries. I need this level of integration because I’m one of those annoying people with a “portfolio career”: I teach, I write, and I sometimes even work as a full time doctor. Medicine has never really been a straight line. Even the Victorian physician John Snow embraced this. He was not only an anaesthetist—famously administering chloroform to Queen Victoria …