…or two

As a young junior partner in a general practice in southern England in the 1970s, I was about to go out on a Saturday morning in the middle of February to make an unusually large number of home visits, a result of the winter flu outbreak that was putting enormous pressure on GPs and hospitals alike. The details of almost every visit simply read: “Very high temperature.”

As I left the surgery, complaining at the length of the list, my wise senior partner (I had been his trainee) simply smiled benignly and said, “The trick today, David, will be to pick out the ones who have malaria and only spend …