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toll.
    Finally the house staff had a party one night, and everybody got drunk on lab alcohol. Around midnight, we decided it would be amusing to draw bloods on ourselves, and send them in for liver-function tests. We used patient names, and sent them off.
    The next morning, the nurses were puzzled. “I don’t get it. Mr. Hennessey has sky-high LFTs. So does Mr. Jackson. And their blood alcohols—this can’t be right. Who ordered these tests, anyway? It’s not in the books.”
    “Oh,
those
tests,” Levine said, very pink-eyed. “I remember. I’ll take those.” And he passed the slips around to us. It turned out we all had evidence of acute liver damage. And we certainly had roaring hangovers.
    “Ready for rounds?” Rogers said briskly. He was greeted with a chorus of groans. “Come, come, we’re already four minutes late.” We started off.
    Rogers was in an unusually cheerful mood. He stuck lots of pins into people. Finally he came to Mrs. Lewis. In the ward, Mrs. Lewis’s bed was always curtained off, because this elderly woman was semicomatose and incontinent, and from time to time she threw her excrement in spastic movements. There was always a slight feeling of danger when we went up to Mrs. Lewis’s bed. And this morning, with hangovers, we weren’t looking forward to it.
    But her bed was clean, and there was no smell. Mrs. Lewis seemed to be sleeping.
    “She seems to be sleeping,” Rogers said. “Let’s just see how responsive she is today.” And he stuck a pin in her.
    The poor comatose woman winced.
    “Hmmm, there seems to be a little response,” Rogers said. He put his pins back in his lapel and pressed his thumb over the bony ridge just below Mrs. Lewis’s eyebrow. He pressed hard.
    “This is a classic way to elicit a pain response,” he explained.
    Mrs. Lewis twisted her body in pain, and her hand went beneath her buttocks. And quickly she slapped a handful of her own feces all over Rogers’s shirt and pressed tie. Then she collapsed back on the bed.
    “Dear,” Rogers said, turning white.
    “That’s a shame,” Levine said, biting his lip.
    “She obviously doesn’t know what she’s doing,” Perkins said, shaking his head.
    “Mr. Crichton, see that she’s cleaned up. I’m going to try and change. But I don’t have a change of clothes at the hospital. I may have to go home.”
    “Yes sir,” I said.
    So I helped clean up Mrs. Lewis, and I blessed her. And not long after that, I rotated off the neurology service, and went on to psychiatry, where I hoped things would be better.

The Girl Who Seduced Everybody
 
    Three medical students at a time were assigned a psychiatry rotation on the wards of the Massachusetts General Hospital. It was a communal-living ward: fifteen psychiatric patients slept and ate in a dormitory setting for six weeks. After six weeks, the staff made a diagnosis and recommended further therapy for each patient.
    The resident explained the whole procedure. As students, we would each be assigned one patient to interview over six weeks. We would then make a report to the staff, and participate in the diagnosis. Other physicians would be interviewing the patients, too, but we would see them more often than anyone else, and our responsibilities were therefore to be taken seriously.
    When we arrived on the floor, the patients were in the midst of a communal meeting. The resident couldn’t interrupt the meeting, but we stood outside the room while he pointed out our patients. Ellen’s patient was a heavyset woman in her fifties who wore garish clothes and makeup. This woman had had an affair with a doctor who gave her amphetamines, and she was now severely depressed. Bob was assigned a thin, scholarly-looking man of fifty who had been in Dachau and who now imagined cardiac problems. I was assigned a tall, strikingly beautiful girl of twenty with short blond hair and a miniskirt. She sat in a rocking chair, her long legs curled under her, looking very calm and