Our Neighbour was an Orthopaedic Surgeon

He used to practice in his garden

I walked past the landing window one day, glancing out over the garden — and the neighbours’ garden beyond. The man of the house next door was busy, building himself what appeared to be wooden-sided raised beds to grow his plants in.

I watched for a moment as he furiously sawed at planks, drilled holes and hammered nails.

You’d think he’d have enough of that in his day job! I said to myself, but out loud. Loud enough for my daughter to overhear me. (I have two daughters, and I can't remember which one it was)

What do you mean, Dad?

Laughing inwardly at my own private joke, I must have flashed a wicked smile as I answered her.

Oh, nothing. I was just being silly.

She persisted, as nine-year-olds tend to do, especially when an adult has said something they suspect might be naughty.

But why, Dad? Is he a joiner?

I laughed out loud now, but unable to speak and nodding my head in agreement.

Unknown to her, she had hit the nail on the head — to continue the carpentry theme.

I was a GP, but my student training and work in hospitals brought me into contact with proponents of the two main branches of medical practice, “Medicine“ and “Surgery“. That is, Medical doctors — physicians — and surgeons. (Sorry, Psychiatry, you are in a class of your own.)

Within Surgery, though, there is a further division: there are surgeons who do things like appendicectomies, heart and lung operations, brain surgery and the like, and there are surgeons who specialise in bones and joints – Orthopaedic Surgeons.

Image from Falkirk Herald

All of these groups of highly-trained specialist doctors have a friendly rivarly, telling jokes and jibes about each other.

Physicians might look down on surgeons from the haughty heights of academia, and dismiss surgeons as glorified butchers and barbers who don’t read obscure articles in dusty tomes — until they need a surgeon to fix the obvious surgical emergency they have absent-mindedly decided must be a new case of Brankenfurten-Sloveskyvich-Bowles-Fitzpatrick Syndrome.

Surgeons tend to decry physicians as knowing more and more about less and less, studying minutiae but ignoring the big picture, having a pill for every ill, etc. etc.

In my experience, Orthopods, as they are sometimes known, bear the brunt of the most jokes. A common one is to liken them to carpenters, with all their use of buzz saws, drills, screws and nails. Another clever witticism is:

Question: “How do you tell the difference between an orthopod and a joiner?“

Answer: “A joiner knows the names of more than two antibiotics."1

They really don’t deserve these jibes. They are highly trained, skilled, and precise specialists.

Meanwhile, of course, the General Practitioners stay out of it, regarding ‘Secondary Care’ — to which all those specialities above belong — as exactly that, second in line after the most important doctors of all. The GPs in ‘Primary Care’, where 95% of all the work is done anyway!

Back to the point — my daughter’s innocent questions about our neighbour. She made me laugh so much I had to explain.

So Mr Mc***** isn’t a real doctor like you?

I explained he was every bit as real a doctor as I was or any other doctor.

But you said he’s a joiner.

Image by pexels-ono-kosuki-5974287

Still laughing, I explained the origins of the joke as best I could to her brilliant, enquiring, nine-year-old mind. I think she got it.

But for years afterwards, she would often come downstairs and announce, Mr Mc*****’s got his saw out again, Dad, he must be doing his homework.

SERIOUS FOOTNOTE.

Our NHS is crucial to our survival as a civilised society.

For all its much-exaggerated failings — failings that will remain out of its control while government after government continues to insist on running it down, squeezing the funding to pay for offshore fund managers’ private jets, and preparing the ground for a third-world US system — the NHS is what we turn to when the chips are down.

Because it’s always there to pick up the pieces. At the moment.

1 With thanks to my old friend and colleague, Dr Andreas Kolle, for the antibiotic joke and for confirming that we share a similar sense of humour with doctors in Germany.

© N J Edmunds, September 2025.

www.njedmunds.com

A version of this article was first published in iSCOT Magazine, Issue 110.