Medical Matters: Medicine, like politics, can be a hereditary disease. Doctors marry doctors and beget doctors, writes Pat Harrold.
Indeed, an overworked surgeon once snarled at me: "Doctors only marry nurses or barmaids because they're the only women they ever get to meet."
He went on to explain to me, as he furiously cut and sewed, that traditionally, nearly all doctors were male. And their partners were female.
And that was that.
In those days, the function of the country GP's wife was seen as bringing style and culture to the god-forsaken hole to which she had agreed in a long forgotten moment of passion to relocate.
She was the mainstay of the choral society, the pony club and the golf club bar. She had a perma-tan and bought her clothes in Dublin. It was for women like these that the Galway Races were invented. If the husband was cheerfully available to everyone with the price of a consultation, there was no obligation on the wife to behave in the same fashion.
She was breathtakingly rude to the patients, especially after 5pm when she had been at the gin.
She would build a huge house in the vernacular style of her favourite glossy magazine. It glowered from a hill at the dreary Irish town in which it had found itself in fierce resentment (now everybody has a huge house in shocking taste and the professions are the new underclass but you have to hand it to the GPs' wives who initially set the pace).
Medical sons and daughters fitted into different categories. It was generally felt that great things were expected of them, and consequently most went completely native.
A scary amount of medical children became musicians in revenge for all those music lessons. (The reason why so many GPs picked the Volvo estate was that it could easily accommodate four lads with their guitars and a drum kit).
You see, doctors were famously unavailable to their families. They threw money at them instead in the form of lessons in music, sailing or, of course, golf. Little doctors knew that they could meet daddy only on the course or in the surgery, so they became his clones and eventually qualified themselves.
Their daughters, as medical students, would simper at the consultants who, as daddy's old pals had confused memories of getting roaring drunk at the little darling's christenings, would let them away with murder.
The day after a consultant received the retirement present from his relieved colleagues he would visit his solicitor to sort out the will. A month later he would reappear in the solicitor's to negotiate the divorce.
After years of running a serene house without the help of a husband, who up to this had only made mercifully brief appearances, the consultant's wife would now be stuck with the old fellow all day.
And not an ordinary husband, but one who was accustomed to being treated like the Emperor of China by his minions in the hospital.
She would generally hide the valuables and decamp to the holiday residence in no time.
I once visited a small town where everybody told me about the recently deceased GP. He couldn't do enough for his patients. "Day or night", he was always available. He had a huge family. Every communion, bedtime and even mealtime was interrupted by the breathless messenger and the hasty departure of the doctor.
The account of his availability invariably ended with "all those children and he ended up in a nursing home". Not one of them would care for him.
It is difficult not to state the obvious. If he was not there for them, why should they be here for him? All those Christmas mornings, all those birthday parties? It is easy to feel for the children, yet I got the sense that he was a genuinely good man. In those days a doctor was often like a missionary in a place where few would choose to live.
God knows he didn't do it for the money, which was little enough for the workload. The solicitor, teacher or guard were probably equally unavailable to their families. Yet you are left with the feeling that the children felt they came second to the needs of the public.
Apparently, the points race is finally over. Country practices are no longer seen as farms or shops, which are to be kept in the family at all costs. Co-ops allow doctors to commute to their practices. And doctors and their families can live as normal a life as anyone can nowadays.
Pat Harrold is a GP practising in Tipperary.
Muiris Houston is on leave.