There’s nothing wrong with being a ‘junior’ doctor

‘The wise bustle and laugh as they walk, but fools bustle and are important,’ wrote F.L. Lucas a century ago. ‘And this, probably is all the difference between them.’ The government and the British Medical Association, who yesterday announced that henceforth junior doctors will be called ‘resident doctors’, are bustling and self-important fools.

I was 37 when I ceased being a junior doctor and became a consultant. Not quite the glittering early success of Pitt the Younger, but I had the common comfort of being ordinary and surrounded by peers roughly my age. I search my memory for the awful horrors caused by carrying around the name ‘junior’ all those years, but I search in vain. No mental scars seem apparent.

Nor, now I come to think of it, do I recall a single occasion in which a colleague or a patient was ever confused about my status.