Carry on swooning

A scene from my childhood floated back to me recently that was so odd I had to interrogate my memory, just to make sure it was tethered to reality. I was ten years old, playing Doctors and Nurses with fellow classmates. The sole premise was that the doctors chased the nurses until they caught one. When that happened, the nurse was pinned down and handfuls of dry grass were shoved into her underwear (the school field was mown in summer) introducing the fear you’d be stung by a wasp and require real medical care. This was the 1970s and, despite second-wave feminism, all the doctors were boys and the nurses were girls.

We turn our healthcare workers into objects of desire and fetishisation

You don’t need Dr Freud to tell you this game was sexually suggestive – nowadays it would have OFSTED sprinting all the way to Child Services. But it also illustrated the fact we Brits have long had a schizoid way of looking at medical professionals. On the one hand, doctors are heroes and nurses are angels. On the other, over past decades we’ve lost no opportunity to turn our healthcare workers into objects of desire and fetishisation. Naughty is pretty much synonymous with nurse, ditto dishy with doctor.

Some of the blame must fall on Carry On Nurse, which was Britain’s highest grossing film in 1959, leading inevitably to the repeat caper Carry On Doctor. Though some of the “phwoar” factor started even earlier with Doctor in the House in 1954. For me this had one of cinema’s greatest exchanges: Dr Simon Sparrow (Dirk Bogarde) puts his stethoscope on a young patient saying, “Now Eva! Big breaths!” and she lispingly replies, “Yeth, and I’m only thixteen.” In my defence, the Washington Post’s film critic said of Carry On Nurse that it was so unabashedly “Lowbrow” it “should also appeal to Highbrows”, given they have much in common, while “Middlebrows should stay away and let the rest of us wallow.”

Anyway, my central point remains. We have an odd, puerile habit of putting medics centre-stage in our collective national fantasy life and it must be very tiresome for practitioners. I suppose it’s something about the authority doctors and nurses have over their patients. You’re weak and helpless in front of them, which can sometimes feel (particularly to stressed wage slaves) like merciful surrender. Then there’s the uniform. OK, scrubs and white gowns aren’t up there with a member of the Household Cavalry in full regalia, but there’s still something seductive in how purposeful they look, as if the wearer is about to do something gory and technical that would make your average human faint. It’s garb that signals, very powerfully: “I might rescue you.”

And as anyone who’s hung out with a bunch of medics can tell you, they tend to be astonishingly badly behaved off-duty. Robert Louis Stevenson was clearly channelling this when he wrote Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I first discovered doctors’ latent calling for debauchery when I was seventeen. A schoolfriend’s older sister was studying medicine in London and my friend and I would be invited to wild fancy-dress parties in the bowels of a famous hospital. Astonishing quantities of alcohol were consumed and revellers copped off with anything that moved. Next morning the near-comatose medics would attach themselves to drips, to rehabilitate in time for ward rounds. I was asked by one of these trainee physicians to dress in a ballet tutu for her 21st birthday, for which my job was to walk up and down a coach busing guests to the party, handing out tequila shots. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t mind being objectified and ended up under a table kissing a houseman.

The nurses in that group of friends were even more outrageous than the docs. I’d listen in awe as they talked nonchalantly about removing beer bottles from rectums, slapping drunks who vomited on them in A&E, or tenderly bandaging children after major surgery. Though that was small fry compared to the doctor friend who worked in a clap clinic in Soho and regaled me with tales of “Mr Warty Clusterfuck” and staring down embarrassed male patients’ erections. Back then, you could probably still write all this on their notes.

No wonder so many people swoon before these high-octane, super-qualified, virtuous-yet-naughty practitioners. Even Princess Diana became besotted with a medic. I laughed at the scenes in Season 5 of The Crown, where Diana meets heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, because it felt emblematic of the admiration we all feel in the face of people who mend others. It’s the reason hundreds of thousands of women first carried George Clooney in their hearts, from his role in ER. But it’s not just men who are lusted after as physicians. When I worked at Private Eye in 1992, the woman in charge of the small ads told me the most popular lonely heart the Eye ever published was an ad that read: “Lady doctor who likes laughing in bed.” This maybe explains the real reason we love medics: they tend to be marvellously, inappropriately funny.

And the fact is, a medic with GSOH is both a pin-up and a panacea.

Rowan Pelling is a British journalist and former editor of The Erotic Review