I remember once I was woken at night by some houseman, who asked me about something on antibiotics and I said, 'I don't know. I'll go and look it up in my book', and Joan, who'd stirred to the surface, said, 'How do you know what you think until you see what you've written?' and I thought that was quite a smart remark. Which is good, isn't it?

No, of course you have to keep looking things up more and more, but there's quite a lot of things... you see that's a phoney business about medical education. We're supposed to have this... learn all this pharmacology and physiology and then derive our medicine from it. I call that the 'Oxbridge fallacy' because as much physiology has come from medicine as medicine has come from physiology. Well, I mean, if you think of it, certainly, certainly students should know the general... the generalities of clinical pharmacology. Of course they should. Absorption, excretion, where the stuff goes to and how it gets rid of, of course they should. But if you're saying, if you're extending on that and implying that you can derive from that any kind of adverse effect or how drugs – it's completely untrue, isn't it? It's just not the case, partly because most of us as doctors don't know that much pharmacology and partly because you don't know what's going to happen. I mean, did anyone actually know with AC inhibitors that people are going to get a terrible, frightful cough which would go on and on? I don't think it was, as far as I know it wasn't reported at all and I suppose there's probably a science behind it now which I don't actually know but that was totally unexpected so it, it just, it's just bogus to say you could derive all this from your scientific thing. You've got to actually know a lot and, above all, of course, take time to find out. Like people forgetting to ask about drugs and stuff, which is the obvious example.