CLASS and doctors in the UK - what is our status?
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CLASS and doctors in the UK - what is our status?
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Coming from a society where there are not low, middle and upper middle classes, neither aristocrats, I was confused other day when attending the shop A., I met a staff member . S
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Forums » Open clinical » General clinical » CLASS and doctors in the UK - what is our status?
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CLASS and doctors in the UK - what is our status?
posted at 5/8/2012 8:42 PM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 164
First: 31/5/2012 Last: 8/10/2012 |
Coming from a society where there are not low, middle and upper middle classes, neither aristocrats, I was confused other day when attending the shop A., I met a staff member . She asked me "why shopping here, this is a shop for the working class ". Did I offend her? By coincidence on the following day something similar happened , when I went to order my sight test. The technician suggested that the place was overcrowded and badly staffed and it is was "okay for the chavs, but not for upper classes ". Can someone help me to get the answer - what social class the Uk doctors belong to? We are all employed by the NHS and paid by the state (except private sector), so why should it matter where one does his weekly shopping, or orders his spectacles? In this highly class divided society who decides what the doctors status is? Census? Income? Country of origin? Family? Marriage...:). |
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Re: CLASS and doctors in the UK - what is our status?
posted at 5/8/2012 10:31 PM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 2054
First: 12/3/2010 Last: 23/5/2013 |
Don't let it worry you, drmk. England has always been like this, the Scots and Welsh are much better at meritocracy, whereas the English have this conflict of wishing to touch the forelock to the squire, while at the same time saying that he's a stuck-up barstard, not better thatn anyone else. Certain parts of the Press play up to this and the Royal Family (most of whom work hard at their job like the rest of us) by portraying them as suprahuman; but they do the same about "celebrities" with no talent or ability at all. But consider this; an IQ of 100, by definition the mean of the population, equips you to do "routine work under supervision". To be a doctor, you must be in the upper quartile of the population for intelligence. Doctors' IQ, again a normal distribution in their sub-group, with a mean of 130, means like it or not, or if your native country recognises that or not, you are in an elite. The thing is that while you ARE an elite, you should not behave as an elite, except professionally. As Kipling wrote, "If you can talk with crowds.... or walk with kings........." John |
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Re: CLASS and doctors in the UK - what is our status?
posted at 6/8/2012 10:50 AM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 19
First: 3/6/2012 Last: 6/8/2012 |
In Response to CLASS and doctors in the UK - what is our status?: Coming from a society where there are not low, middle and upper middle classes, neither aristocrats, I was confused other day when attending the shop A., I met a staff member . She asked me "why shopping here, this is a shop for the working class ". Did I offend her? By coincidence on the following day something similar happened , when I went to order my sight test. The technician suggested that the place was overcrowded and badly staffed and it is was "okay for the chavs, but not for upper classes ". Can someone help me to get the answer - what social class the Uk doctors belong to? We are all employed by the NHS and paid by the state (except private sector), so why should it matter where one does his weekly shopping, or orders his spectacles? In this highly class divided society who decides what the doctors status is? Census? Income? Country of origin? Family? Marriage...:). Posted by drmk Hi there, read Jilly Copper and you will find even more anecdotes. Shame and sad |
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Re: CLASS and doctors in the UK - what is our status?
posted at 6/8/2012 12:03 PM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 2948
First: 10/3/2009 Last: 23/5/2013 |
I cannot comment on the status of doctors in the UK but in Australia doctors generally are held in high regard. We have less marked class structures than you, and certainly no aristocracy. Instead we have mining magnates, media barons and once had a farming aristocracy on the land we called the squattocracy as they were originally squatters in the early days of settlement. Squatters just established their farms often without official government approval. Language is a fairly unkind marker of social class and even IQ. It can come as a surprise sometimes to find medical practitioner with a broad Australian accent which might sometimes be associated with the bucolic straw-chewing "cow cocky" as we call our farmers in the bush. It is my experience particularly of the young in this country that people quickly try to identify the tribe from which you emanate. The usual opening the line with regards which school one went to and in which city quickly sorts out pecking order. This is particularly notable in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. Brisbane is less snobby but still has its snobs. We are all sort of snobs at heart. Class identity, one's football club, one school, one's religion et cetera is part of the herd instinct of the species. That is why the Olympics touches such a raw nerve. It identifies class, country, money, racial superiority, pecking order etc it really has little to do with sport which just acts as a catalyst for identification with one's greater herd for a few weeks until the next war, the next armistice and the next Hiroshima which was today. I am okay because my team won more gold than yours. It has few winners and a lot of losers. How many social occasions have I been to that someone asked me, as boring as it all is, what school I went to really to find out whether I am a Catholic. This is the secret handshake which immediately enables the interrogator to find out whether you have positive or negative vibrations, whether you are heading for heaven or for hell. To get back to class and doctors, I think we belong to the middle-class. Few of us are aristocrats. Some come from a working class. I do has my father was a doctor and was always working. I childhood was nothing but a working doctor. I certainly didn't go to Eton even though it resides in a totally egalitarian nation, notwithstanding its large expensive rowing ponds. Middle-class is comme ci, comme-ca. It is safe. It is so so and can be divided into upper-middle-class, upper lower-middle-class, lower upper-middle-class, lower lower-middle-class et cetera depending on schooling how many cars in your garage, whether your wife wears her sunglasses on her head, on whether your children attend grammar school and what yacht club you belonged to. Open your mouth and sound like a lower, lower class, and your aspirations to be upper middle-class or even just upper-class may have evaporate with your social aspirations. Yes, I am working class in a way. Only Pensionners and the rich don't work. I'm still working and properly will until I die. |
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Re: CLASS and doctors in the UK - what is our status?
posted at 6/8/2012 3:33 PM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 164
First: 31/5/2012 Last: 8/10/2012 |
Open your mouth and sound like a lower, lower class, and your aspirations to be upper middle-class or even just upper-class may have evaporate with your social aspirations. Posted by Odysseus You misunderstood my discussion - no aspirations, just asking |
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Re: CLASS and doctors in the UK - what is our status?
posted at 6/8/2012 10:13 PM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 2948
First: 10/3/2009 Last: 23/5/2013 |
I apologise if you thought I caused offence to you. My last paragraph was in the impersonal "you" of English not the personal as "one" sounds so English and formal. |
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Re: CLASS and doctors in the UK - what is our status?
posted at 7/8/2012 12:07 AM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 2054
First: 12/3/2010 Last: 23/5/2013 |
Oh, yeah, Odysseus? See the Wikipedia entry entitled "Australian Peers" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_peers Led, perhaps, by The Viscount Slim of Yarralumla. Lets have no more of that "We have no aristocracy", please. You do, even if there aren't many. The English, however good they are at hearing a "lower class" accent, even if covered up a la "My Fair Lady", are useless at telling a foreigner's class. Even the Scots and the Welsh are immune from class distinction if they move to England, and Americans and Aussies are only that. Either will tell you what part of Melbourne or Minnesota their countryman comes from, and sneer at them. Much of the so-called class discrimination in England is in fact inverse snobbery, a sort of non-political Marxism, that calls for anyone who doesn't like bingo and the Daily Mail to be lined up against the wall as class enemies. Willy Russell, not exactly an upper-class twit himself, wrote an excellent play, that was filmed as well, "Educating Rita", about a "lower class" girl who goes to Uni. Her problem is with her family who call her a stuck-up [female dog], not with the "middle-class" students. But most people who would describe themselves as working class are not like that, as long as no one tries the upper-class thing on them. I had a lovely day yesterday, including a visit to Barts, my old med school. I met some of the non-medical staff in the Square and chatted, and despite my Surrey accent (I'm still a southern woos jessie after 30 years in the North) we had a great chat, about what was happening in the Hospital and what was going wrong. They didn't think I was too upper-class to talk to, even though they knew I was a senior doctor. John |
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Re: CLASS and doctors in the UK - what is our status?
posted at 7/8/2012 2:40 AM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 2948
First: 10/3/2009 Last: 23/5/2013 |
We are unusual in terms of accent that we have no real regional accents but some regional words and expressions. We have the broad bush accent and then the "class" accent which is usually to do with grammar or lack thereof. Aboriginal people have a unique way of talking if you go out in the bush. We therefore are generally freed from the tyranny of tongue by the tyranny of distance which brings us all together so a man from Perth sounds like a man from Brisbane 5000 km away. Our news readers are much less English in their accent than they were when I was a boy. Then Australians had the cultural cringe and thought we were inferior to the Motherland which may be true of our current Olympic standing but not our national aspirations. I note that our national Olympic "shame" has been mitigated a bit by one of our sailors as our anthem says we are "girt by sea' although we rarely use girt in everyday speech. Few would know the present tense of the past participle "girt". Nevertheless we are girding up our loins for more not that our loins need girding. Language is such a knife. |
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Re: CLASS and doctors in the UK - what is our status?
posted at 7/8/2012 3:46 PM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 4
First: 30/3/2012 Last: 13/9/2012 |
In Response to CLASS and doctors in the UK - what is our status?: Good question, especially if you have been forcibly inserted into the British Class system. If you need to think about the answer to the question, then you are not upper class. I was once told by an advertising exec that doctors would never be in the highest echelons (except, I suppose if you were born into it( - my finals viva was by one of the Wedgewood family of pottery wealth). There is a useful web site if you want to navel gaze: http://www.businessballs.com/demographicsclassifications.htm They would put the medical profession into the highest classification, but that should not inhibit you from shopping at Aldi. Their smoked salmon is the best. |
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Re: CLASS and doctors in the UK - what is our status?
posted at 7/8/2012 4:30 PM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 164
First: 31/5/2012 Last: 8/10/2012 |
[QUOTE: Good question, especially if you have been forcibly inserted into the British Class system. If you need to think about the answer to the question, then you are not upper class. I was once told by an advertising exec that doctors would never be in the highest echelons (except, I suppose if you were born into it Posted by iatros[/QUOTE] Many thanks! This is the core of my discussion - why should it matter - the class? If patients are not happy to be treated by foreign doctors who obviously do not belong to any of the UK stereopipes and local classes, then the GMC and the BMA need to say it clearly - what are we supposed to do? The current situation is not cleraly cut...as man,y many others |
Forums » Open clinical » General clinical » CLASS and doctors in the UK - what is our status?
