A recent piece of odious tripe in the Wall Street Journal obscured a serious question: Should there be special terms of address for medical professionals which distinctly mark them as people trusted with matters of life and death?
Academics and those who write for them say no, that anyone who has an Xy. D. degree should be called Doctor. That’s the standard style for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the leading ruling class publications of left and right: If you have a doctoral degree in anything whatsoever, you are referred to as Dr. Whoever because you wrote a dissertation on hotel management for pimps or getting away with dishonest marketing or particle physics. It’s all the same. A doctorate is a doctorate and it all goes on the resumé.
Those of us who spend significant time outside the academic bubble know better. No one ever yells “Doctor!” because they need an explanation of Keynesian economics or a case study in stripping local municipalities of assets through charter schools.
People ask for a doctor because they are in danger of dying. That’s it.
If I say, “I need a doctor,” and you send me a Nobel Prize winner in physics, you are a jackass.
Further, the only doctors people outside a very narrow world encounter are medical doctors of some sort. GP, surgeon, osteopath, chiropractor–even a veterinarian. I’ll take a DVM over a Ph.D. in biochemistry if my kid is sick and those are my choices.
This should be a learning moment for academics: Your terms of art are not meaningful to most people. Your use of them in public discussions is careless at best and deceptive at worst. When you also use them for self-aggrandizement, you should be ashamed.
Which wouldn’t change anything, even if you were.
So instead, let’s talk about something useful: Reserved titles for medical professionals. What is the proper title for someone who must answer when you call from a child’s sickbed? I can think of three such professions: Doctor, Nurse, EMT.
The obvious titles are Doc. for doctors, Nrs. for nurses, and Emt. for EMTs. I don’t like Nrs. for nurses, because it reminds me of when women in college were said to be there “to get their Mrs. degree”. Maybe that’s far enough in the past to be okay now. I don’t know.
I do think medical professionals, whose public responsibilities are greater than any other degree-holding class, should advocate for specific titles that mark them separately. What they do is qualitatively different from what the rest of us do.
