Anatomical Encounters

( This is a edited version of the  post from " Learning General surgery. " Group on Facebook. )

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To hell with MBBS syllabus (of the past)

The first thing that really scared me out as I entered the portals of medical school after passing class 12 was the sheer size and weight of ‘Gray’s anatomy’. How on earth any human can read that small print and those thousands of diagrams and remember all of them? It took no time for me to realize that my physique with my brain is tailor made for BD Chaurasia and AF Golwala. Harrisons, Nelsons, Best and Taylor and a whole lot of medical books looked like overgrown pumpkins to me put up for competition for their sheer size in some remote farm in Australia. Believe me I have never even once ventured to open any one of them , leave alone reading them and making notes. Some Indian guides and short books were always available for every subject, and they came quite handy for passing exams. If everyone else in my class would have read more than 100kg worth of books to pass their MBBS, I have managed to do the same with less than 10kgs all put together. I often wonder why all medical tetxtbooks are omnibus types while all other subject books on earth are bicycle types.

Then there is this anatomy viva taken by villainy individuals. We used to have Prof.SC Mitra who had handed to me ‘Scaphoid’ bone’ in my final exam and made it traverse my entire GIT in the reverse direction and vomit it out. Soon I had almost fainted. That experience was like waterboarding and inspired me to forbid any of my progeny from taking up Medicine for a career. I would have chosen a career in ‘fashion designing’ and would have worked very to get into the National Institute of Fashion Designing and would have had the fortune of having some of the prettiest damsels on mother earth as class fellows.

Medical school was sheer torture especially during the exam season and am sure my blood biochemistry would gone haywire   if I had really checked it every time. With all Einsteins and Stephen Hawkings as class fellows with a very high IQ, life, I should say was miserable in my medical school. If born again I would choose between fashion designing and salesperson in Nalli Silks.

The British had proved their sadism by creating a monstrous syllabus for India before leaving our shores and made sure that the syllabus in the UK is user friendly and practical. And for some strange reason pass percentage in MBBS for decades was next only to CA. Strangely those MBBS graduates who took more than one attempt to pass did very well in their later careers and drove Mercedes Benz. The studious ones retired as sadistic professors in medical colleges.

I came to understand that it is very difficult to fail in MBBS and post-graduate exams these days and most medical colleges across India like many convent schools in India compete to attain and advertise their 100% pass rate. Its just enough if you attend the examination. A pass is a foregone conclusion. Wish I did MBBS now and not wasted my pressors in my prime time.