Superstition and medicine

By BBC Doctor Colin Thomas

When you are doing your house jobs, starved of sleep and the outside world for weeks on end you aren't always fully aware of what day, let alone what date it is.

That was the point where I decided I needed a date on my watch to keep me orientated.

We had a surgical list on a Friday afternoon, and many of the routine cases were admitted to hospital that same morning as there wasn't really much that needed to be done prior to their minor bladder examinations under anaesthetic.

On one particular Friday we were expecting our usual complement of eight or nine, but I was surprised to discover that only four or five had turned up.

This had never happened before. I wasn't complaining however, because normally I'd have been rushing round trying to see them all before the afternoon deadline.

But I was very curious to know why on this occasion the patients were so thin on the ground.

I was still blissfully unaware until I started to clerk my first patient, looked at my watch and wrote the date on the patient's notes. Friday 13th July, 1984.

Significant date

There are a not an insignificant number of people who quake at the very thought of that particular date, and that 'Friday the thirteenth' experience as a surgical houseman made me realise how significant that day can be for some people.

By the time I'd graduated up to working in casualty I was actually quite apprehensive about working on Friday the 13th.

What terrible problems and accidents would befall people on this fateful day? Would I be cursed with making a terrible fatal error?

So, clutching my rabbit's foot and with a string of garlic around my neck I set off for work.

As you can guess nothing really untoward happened ..... until I was ushered in to deal with an old lady who needed to have the skin on her shin stitched back.

In older people this skin is very vulnerable to injury, and is as difficult as trying to stitch two pieces of tissue paper together.

When I enquired as to the reason for her injury the whole power of Friday the 13th was unleashed.

"Well", she said, "I was walking along the pavement when I saw a ladder in front of me.

"Being Friday the thirteenth, doctor I decided that I shouldn't walk under the ladder so I stepped out into the road to avoid it - and a bicycle ran into me!"