Med Student Duck Hunt-on Laughter and the Best Medicine
It’s odd. I have yet to don a white coat or take a patient’s blood pressure, and yet medical culture has already influenced how I think about certain specialties and how I perceive myself as fitting into them. In part, this is because I come from a medical family-both my parents are psychiatrists (Yeah, I know, another reason I’m strange). And the med school interview process directly asks, “What kind of a doctor would you be?” Then there are pop culture books, TV shows, and movies.
But the influences that interest me are those that come to us unintentionally. Consider jokes.
A man came into a doctor’s office with a banana shoved into one ear, several grapes jammed into his nose, and a carrot wedged into the other ear.
The doctor looks at the man and says, “Well, for one thing, I can tell that you’re not eating right.”
No, not that kind of joke. “Doctor, it hurts when I do this…” We hear such jokes as commentary on general human folly. I’m talking about jokes that tickle only those being educated about the different medical sects. Here’s one every medical student is require to listen to in some form or another. It usually, but not always, involves a duck hunt:
An internist, a surgeon, and a pathologist decide to go duck hunting. Once among the reeds the three men hunker down. Suddenly two birds takes off.
The internist whips out a M40A3 US Marine Corps special-issue sniper riffle and instantly draws a bead on one of the flying objects. “Hmmm…well, it’s got two wings, two feet, it flies,” says the internist. “Definitely a bird. Could be a duck…but I need to rule out quail, seagull, and turkey. Ah, it’s quacking and has a green head. Both are characteristic of ducks. Wait…wait… I see that the bird has receded sufficiently to exceed the rifle range. Therefore the question of its nature is moot.”
The ducks FLY AWAY!
This upsets the surgeon. “All right,” he declares while pulling out a Remington 1100 gas-operated semi-automatic shotgun. “I’m taking control here.” Suddenly a quacking sound comes from the reeds next to them and the surgeon promptly blasts twenty rounds into the vegetation.
When things quiet down, faint moaning comes from the now-shredded reed bank.
“Was that a duck?” the surgeon asks.
“An interesting situation,” the internist muses. “Could be a loon with compromised vocal cords. Or it could have been a duck hunter. They make quacking sounds.”
“Something’s never change,” grumbles the pathologists. “I go find out what it is you two have killed.”
The stereotype of surgeons as scalpel-happy jocks is familiar to us from TV shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Scrubs. But the overly-academic interest might be new. Internal medicine is the study of nonsurgical treatment of adult diseases, mostly of internal organs. Put more simply, internists have to figure how what’s wrong with an organ, or several organs, without opening up the patient to take a look. This requires a lot of detective work to rule out a large number of diseases and injuries in order to reach a diagnosis. Traditionally, surgery and internal medicine have been viewed as the most competitive and the most demanding residencies. In recent years, both have waned in popularity as medical students search for specialties with more congenial life-styles, such as radiology or dermatology.
But the interesting thing about the duck hunt joke is how foolish both specialties are. Different versions of the joke lampoon the surgeon or the internist to a greater degree. (The above version was told to me by an internist.) But however the joke is told, at its heart is the message that both the surgeon and a internist are completely screwed. The pathologist, confined to watch the other hunters screw up, isn’t much better off either. Of course, anyone from my generation knows that there’s no winning at Duck Hunt.
The joke is both criticism of surgeons and internists and a cautionary tale about the dangers of each discipline. Medicine being a sober profession (usually), it is wonderful to see such an important message conveyed by humor. For when we invest our brains with training, we expose ourselves to the foibles of that discipline. We, in a sense, make ourselves more stereotypical.
Many, many jokes take aim at this fact. Most are dismissive and angry; I’m thinking of every lawyer joke (“And the other one’s a fish”) I’ve ever heard. We hear a lot about healing powers of humor, but humor is like any other tool; it can be used to repair or destroy. I’m willing to wager that for every curative joke, there are a hundred deleterious ones.
That said, for many med students the lesson of the duck hunt joke is unforgettable, mostly because we laugh. Humor amplifies a message, makes it more informative, restorative, or painful.
I’d change the old saying to “Laugher can be the best medicine.”
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