The ghost in the machine. (the influence of military culture in the UK's National Health Service)(Soundings) (Column)

When I was being taught medicine in the 1960s the bit I found most interesting was learning how medicine worked. Of course we were not formally taught the anthropology of the profession we were being groomed to join, but after a year away from it all--spent on VSO in a dusty, multi-tribed market town in the heart of West Africa--I returned feeling reasonably equipped to decipher the habits of the tribe for myself.

I made a curious and useful discovery: many of the doctors I observed then, certainly the vast majority of the most senior specimens, behaved quite often as though they were still in the forces. Even more curiously, younger people who'd never been in the …